Excerpt from The Twentieth Century ChildA large number of children-the majority, I suppose - confide everything about them selves to their parents, and nothing about their parents or home to anybody else. A certain number of others confide everything about their home and their parents to some outside friend, and regard all their guardians as quaint specimens of natural history, rather liable to bite, most comfortable at a distance, but quite interesting topics for conversation with intimate friends. The former and more common kind of home-life one watches with love and envy, but with no more intimate comprehension than may come from memories of one's own childhood. From youngstersof the latter class one can learn everything that it is possible to know about a child of this kind of either sex and every age.In excuse for the defects of this book, which, of course, are many, I can only suggest that its general tendency must be to give slightly undue prominence to the minority of children who do not lead a purely normal home-life.One other word I want to add. The stories of children's humour in these pages are quite genuine for the simple reason that I hate taking any trouble, and it is so much easier to tell real child-stories than to make them up that I have adopted the former course.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.