Illness by Alice Meynell — Read

The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some little books, but none the less a fresh fact. In spite of the sentimental, child... ren in illness remain the full sources of perpetual surprises. Their self-control in real suffering is a wonder. A little turbulent girl, brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might be thought, to deal in any way with her own impulses -- a child whose way was to cry out, laugh, complain, and triumph without bating anything of her own temperament, and without the hesitation of a moment, struck her face, on a run, against a wall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed with pain and covered with blood. "Tell mother it's nothing. Tell mother, quick, it's nothing!" cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.

The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to lie for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken little body might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure, painful; and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded by twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that had carried her through all her years -- impulse. A condition of acute consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of life had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of a child's days and nights at eight years old.