A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

Intelligence of Children––I was once emphasising the fact that every child could learn to speak two languages at once with equal facility, when a gentleman present stated that he had a son who was a missionary in Bagdad, married to a German lady, and their little son of three expressed all he had to say with equal fluency in three languages––German, English, and Arabic, using each in speaking to those persons whose language it was. ‘Nana, which does God love best, little girls or little boys?’ said a meditative little girl of four. ‘Oh, little girls, to be sure,’ said Nana, with a good-natured wish to please. ‘Then if God loves little girls best, why was not God Himself a little girl?’ Which of us who have reached the later stages of evolution would have hit upon a more conclusive argument? If the same little girl asked on another occasion, watching the blackbirds at the cherries: ‘Nana, if the bees make honey, do the birds make jam?’ it was by no means an inane question, and only proves that we older persons are dull and inappreciative of such mysteries of Nature as that bees should make honey.