STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 663 



children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occa- 

 sional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, the child's inter- 

 course with his doll and his toy " gee gee " is on the whole a 

 striking display of loving solicitude a solicitude which is at once 

 tender and corrective, and has the enduring constancy of a ma- 

 ternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a doll, the 

 wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, keeping it Warm, 

 feeding it, bathing it, tending it while sick and so forth, to make 

 it look pretty, to make it behave nicely, approving, scolding, as 

 occasion arises, and note the misery of the child when parted 

 from it, without acknowledging that in this plaything human- 

 ized by childish fancy we have the very focus of the rays of 

 childish tenderness ; that in the child's devotion to its wooden pet 

 we have a striking example of the truth that daily companion- 

 ship and the habit of caring for a thing make it an inseparable 

 part of us. 



Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and 

 pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects 

 in the inanimate world. The expression of pity for the falling 

 leaves and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, 

 referred to above, shows how quick childish feeling is to detect 

 what is sad in the look of things. Children have even been known 

 to apply the commiserating vocable " poor " to a torn paper figure 

 and to a bent pin. It seems right to suppose tha.t here too the 

 tender heart of the child saw occasion for pity. 



It is worth noting that childish sorrow at the sufferings of 

 things is sometimes so keen that even artistic descriptions which 

 contain a " cruel " element are shunned. A little boy under four 

 " is indignant [writes his mother] at any picture where an animal 

 suffers. He has even turned against several of his favorite pic- 

 tures German Bilderbogen because they are ' cruel/ as the bear 

 led home with a corkscrew in his nose." The extreme mani- 

 festation of this shrinking from the representation of animal or 

 human suffering is dislike for " sad stories." The unsophisticated 

 tender heart of the child can find no pleasure in horrors which 

 appear to be the crowning delight of many an adult reader. 



Here, however, it is evident we verge on the confines of senti- 

 mental pity. It is worth remarking that it is the highly imagina- 

 tive children who shed most tears over these fictitious sufferings. 

 Children with more matter-of-fact minds and a practical turn are 



not so affected. Thus a mother writes of her two girls : " M , 



being the most imaginative, is and always has been much affected 

 by sad stories, especially if read to her with dramatic inflections 

 of voice. From two years old upward these have always affected 



her to tears, while P , who is really the most tender-hearted 



and helpful, but has little imagination, never cries at sad stories, 



