STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 583 



announcing his brother, Felix does not say, * Emile is come ' ; he 

 says, ' The brother of the coachman is come.' " * Pestalozzi's little 

 boy, aged three years and a half, was one day playing at being 

 butcher, when his mother called him by his usual diminutive, 

 " Jacobli." He at once replied : " No, no ; you should call me 

 butcher now." f 



The intensity of the imaginative realizing powers in play is 

 seen, too, in the stickling for fidelity to the original in all playful 

 reproduction, whether of scenes observed in everyday life or of 

 what has been narrated. The same little boy who showed his 

 picture books to dolly was, we are told, when two years and eight 

 months old, fond of imagining that he was Priest, his grandmam- 

 ma's coachman. " He drives his toy horse from the armchair as 

 a carriage, getting down every minute to ' let the ladies out ' or to 

 * go shopping.' The make-believe extends to his insisting on the 

 reins being held while he gets down, and so forth." The same 

 thing shows itself in acting out stories. The full enjoyment of 

 the realization depends on the faithful reproduction, the suitable 

 outward embodiment of the vivid detailed idea in the player's 

 mind. A delightful example of boyish exactitude in acting out a 

 story may be found in Mark Twain's picture of Tom Sawyer and 

 Huckleberry Finn playing at being shipwrecked on a desert 

 island. 



The following anecdote bears another kind of testimony a 

 most winsome kind to the reality of children's play : One day 

 two sisters said to one another, " Let us play being sisters." This 

 might well sound insane enough to hasty ears, but is it not really 

 eloquent ? To me it suggests that the girls felt they were not real- 

 izing their sisterhood, not enjoying all the possible sweets of it, as 

 they wanted to do ; perhaps there had been a quarrel and a super- 

 vening childish coolness, and they felt that the way to get this 

 vivid sense of what they were or ought to be one to the another was 

 by playing the part, enacting a scene in which they would come 

 close to one another in intense conjoint activity. 



But there is still another and some will think a more conclu- 

 sive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play illusion. 

 The child finds himself confronted by the unbelieving adult, who 

 may even be cruel enough to laugh at his play and his day 

 dreamings ; and this frosty aloofness, this unfeeling quizzing of 

 their little doings, is apt to cut the sensitive little nerves to the 

 quick. I have heard of children who will cry if a stranger sud- 

 denly enters the nursery when they are hard at play and shows 

 himself unsympathetic and critical. But here is a story which 



* Quoted by Compayre, op. cit., p. 150. 



f Do Guimps's Life of Pestalozzi (English translation), p. 41. 



