A Spray of Southernwood

To pass from little girls to little boys is to go into quite another,
an inferior, coarser world. No doubt there are wonderful little boys,
but as a rule their wonderfulness consists in a precocious intellect:
this kind doesn't appeal to me, so that if I were to say anything on
the matter, it would be a prejudiced judgment. Even the ordinary
civilised little boy, the nice little gentleman who is as much at home
in the drawing-room as at his desk in the school-room or with a bat in
the playing-field--even that harmless little person seems somehow
unnatural, or denaturalised to my primitive taste. A result, I will
have it, of improper treatment. He has been under the tap, too
thoroughly scrubbed, boiled, strained and served up with melted butter
and a sprig of parsley for ornament in a gilt-edged dish. I prefer him
raw, and would rather have the street-Arab, if in town, and the
unkempt, rough and tough cottage boy in the country. But take them
civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no
more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child
which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect
the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the
grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow. And yet, incredible as it seems, that
very quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes found in the
boy and, with it, strange to say, the boy's proper mind and spirit. The
child lover will meet with one of that kind once in ten years, or not
so often--not oftener than a collector of butterflies will meet with a
Camberwell Beauty. The miraculous little girl, we know, is not more
uncommon than the Painted Lady, or White Admiral. And I will here give
a picture of such a boy--the child associated in my mind with a spray
of southernwood.

And after this impression, I shall try to give one or two of ordinary
little boys. These live in memory like the little girls I have written
about, not, it will be seen, because of their boy nature, seeing that
the boy has nothing miraculous, nothing to capture the mind and
register an enduring impression in it, as in the case of the girl; but
owing solely to some unusual circumstance in their lives--something
adventitious.

It was hot and fatiguing on the Wiltshire Downs, and when I had toiled
to the highest point of a big hill where a row of noble Scotch firs
stood at the roadside, I was glad to get off my bicycle and rest in the
shade. Fifty or sixty yards from the spot where I sat on the bank on a
soft carpet of dry grass and pine-needles, there was a small, old,
thatched cottage, the only human habitation in sight except the little
village at the foot of the hill, just visible among the trees a mile
ahead. An old