What Town Children can Do

Town children may get a great deal of pleasure in watching the ways of sparrows – knowing little birds, and easily tamed by a dole of crumbs, — and their days out will bring them in the way of new acquaintances.  But much may be done with sparrows.  A friend writes:  — “Have you seen the man in the gardens of the Tuileries feeding and talking to dozens of them?  They sit on his hat, his hands, and feed from his fingers.  When he raises his arms they all flutter up and then settle again on him and round him.  I have watched him call a sparrow from a distance by name and refuse food to all others till ‘petit chou,’ a pretty pied sparrow, came for his destined bit.  Others had their names and came at call, but I could not see any distinguishing feature; and the crowd of sparrows on the walk, benches and railing, formed a most attentive audience to the bright French talk which kept them in constant motion as they were, here one and there another, invited to come for a tempting morsel.  Truly a St Francis and the birds!”

The child who does not know the portly form and spotted breast of the thrush, the graceful flight of the swallow, the yellow bill of the blackbird, the gush of song which the skylark pours from above, is nearly as much to be pitied as those London children who ‘had never seen a bee.’  A pleasant acquaintance, easy to pick up, is the hairy caterpillar.  The moment to seize him is when he is seen shuffling along the ground in a great hurry; he is on the lookout for quiet quarters in which to lie up:  put him in a box, then, and cover the box with net, through which you may watch his operations.  Food does not matter – he has other things to attend to.  By-and-by he spins a sort of white tent or hammock, into which he retires; you may see through it and watch him, perhaps at the very moment when his skin splits asunder, leaving him, for months to come, an egg-shaped mass without any sign of life.  At last the living thing within breaks out of this bundle, and there it is, the handsome tiger-moth, fluttering feeble wings against the net.  Most children of six have had this taste of a naturalist’s experience, and it is worth speaking of only because, instead of being merely a harmless amusement, it is a valuable piece of education, of more use to the child than the reading of a whole book of natural history, or much geography and Latin.  For the evil is, that children get their knowledge of natural history, like all their knowledge, at second hand.  They are so sated with wonders, that nothing surprises them; and they are so little used to see for themselves, that nothing interests them.  The cure for this blasé condition is, to let them alone for a bit, and then begin on new lines.  Poor children, it is no fault of theirs if they are not as they were meant to be – curious eager little souls, all agog to explore so much of this wonderful world as they can get at, as quite their first business in life.

“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all!”[1]