The following lines, for example, are a
revelation of childish psychology, and probably may be applied, with
almost as much truth, to the childhood of our race:--
"Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at what is above
them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its 'red
sodgers' and lady-birds, and all its queer things; _their world is
about three feet high_, and they are more often stooping than gazing
up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings
of the rooms in the manse at Biggar."
I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-like in
so many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not the phenomena
of the heavens, but objects more on a level with their eyes--the "queer
things" of their low-lying world. In this essay on his father, Dr. Brown
has written lines about a child's first knowledge of death, which seem as
noteworthy as Steele's famous passage about his father's death and his
own half-conscious grief and anger. Dr. Brown describes a Scottish
funeral--the funeral of his own mother--as he saw it with the eyes of a
boy of five years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months--
"leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight--the crowding
horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse . . .
Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers,
was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the
unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often
enough seen since.
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