Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike.

Child contrasts nature’s effortless variety with society’s anxious conformity. By likening people to “a bag of marbles” or “a string of mold candles,” she suggests that social pressures reduce living individuality to mass-produced sameness—separate units that nonetheless look interchangeable. Her rhetorical question about clothing points to fashion as a visible symbol of deeper imitation: the fear of standing out. The closing image—frost never painting the same window twice—invokes nature as an authority for difference, implying that uniqueness is not a defect but a fundamental principle of creation. The passage reads as an early, distinctly American defense of self-reliance and personal expression, especially resonant in a culture increasingly shaped by commercial taste and social respectability.