Читать книгу Memoirs of Eighty Years - Thomas Gordon Hake - Страница 7

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I had a sister; she came two or three years before me, and died at the age of four or five and twenty, of typhoid fever. She was attended, but in vain, by men of skill—Dr. J. A. Wilson, physician to St. George’s, and Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary.

Then I have a brother, who came last—two years after me—my oldest friend.

We both had good abilities, as time has since shown, but being let to run wild, we had no serious use for them, so we devoted them to mischief. It seems a settled purpose in nature for children to destroy whatever things they can lay their hands on, by way of testing the strength of materials, and to privately annoy all who come within their reach, not out of wickedness, but for fun. I and my brother fully entered into these views, and did all in our power to assist them; the consequence was, we were a good deal disliked. Another failing that we indulged in was a love of the village boys’ society, and this caused us to be looked down on by gentlemen’s sons. The street boys we found the best company, and they were amenable to our orders, which could not be said of the genteel class.

All this is defensible in children who are allowed to follow their own devices, and is a sign of health, for good little boys and girls are never very well. There is no intellectual endowment of such value as a sense of the ridiculous; it argues the existence of imagination, to which it is a supplement and corrective.

Can any one say he has more than one friend who makes him part of himself? I have one—my brother. I used to say once, “If you want friends, you must breed them;” but experience tells us that this method has only an average success. Acquired friends must be engrafted in youth, or before, while growth is going on. Friendships made later are only impressions; they are not an integral part of us; and, though they may flourish, are liable to be overturned. Stately as they may become, like the elm, they have no tap-root.

I said, the other day at dinner, before one of my brother’s sons, but playfully, “I and my brother are fonder of each other than we are of our own children; but we have known each other longer than we have known them.”

A child to be healthy should not be too clever; he should only have receptive power and humour. How grown-up children even differ in this respect!