ents is his best safeguard; and that to shake this innocent belief, this natural and holy creed of infancy, is to destroy childhood itself, and to substitute the precocious melancholy of a prig.
For nothing can be more dreary than the recital of Elsie's sorrows and persecutions. Every page is drenched with tears. She goes about with "tear-swollen eyes," she rushes to her room "shaken with sobs," her grief is "deep and despairing," she "cries and sobs dreadfully," she "stifles her sobs," but this is rare, she is "blinded with welling tears." In her more buoyant moments, a tear merely "trickles down her cheek," and on comparatively cheerful nights she is content to shed "a few quiet tears upon her pillow." On more serious occasions, "a low cry of utter despair broke from her lips," and when spoken to harshly by her father, "with a low cry of anguish, she fell forward in a deep swoon." And yet I am asked to believe that this dismal, tear-soaked, sobbing, hysterical little girl has been adopted by healthy children as one of the favorite heroines of "American juvenile fiction."
