‘I can’t stop thinking.’––’But I can’t stop thinking; I can’t make my mind to sit down!’ Poor little girl! All children owe you thanks for giving voice to their dumb woes. And we grown up people have so little imagination, that we send a little boy with an over-active brain to play by himself in the garden in order to escape the fag of lessons. Little we know how the brain-people swarm in and out and rush about!
”The human (brain) is like a millstone, turning ever round and round;
If it have nothing else to grind, it must itself be ground.”
Set the child to definite work by all means, and give him something to grind. But, pray, let him work with things and not with signs––the things of Nature in their own places, meadow and hedgerow, woods and shore.