STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 581 



But the boy has his doll-love also, and is often hardly less 

 faithful than the girl. Endless is the variety of role assigned to 

 the doll as to the tiny shell in our just-quoted description of play. 

 The doll is the all-important comrade in that solitude ct deux of 

 which the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs. Burnett, in her 

 pleasant memoir of her childhood,* tells us that' while sitting and 

 holding her doll in the armchair of the parlor she would sail 

 across enchanted seas to enchanted islands, meeting with all sorts 

 of thrilling adventures. At another time, when she wanted to 

 act an Indian chief, the doll just as obediently took up the part 

 of squaw. 



Very humanly, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to 

 use her pet, even though, as George Sand reminds us, there come 

 moments of rage and battering. A little boy of two and a half 

 years asked his mother one day, " Will you give me all my pic- 

 ture books to show dolly ? I don't know which he will like best." 

 He then pointed to each in turn, and looked at the doll's face for 

 the answer. He made believe that it selected one, and then 

 gravely showed it all the pictures, saying, " Look here, dolly," 

 and carefully explaining them. In this way does the child seek 

 to bring his mute playmate into the closest intimacy with him- 

 self, sharing his life to the full. The same thing is touchingly 

 illustrated in the fact that Laura Bridgman, when visited by 

 Dickens in 1842, was found to have put a tiny band over her doll's 

 eyes to match the band she herself had to wear. It is illustrated 

 further in the fact that a child is apt to insist on dolly's being 

 treated by others as courteously as himself, expecting them to 

 say good night to it on saying good night to himself, and so 

 forth. 



Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have the clearest evidence 

 of play illusion. The lively imagination endows the inert wooden 

 thing with the warmth of life and love. How large a part is 

 played here by the alchemist, fancy, is known to all observers of 

 children's ways. The faith, the devotion, often seem to increase 

 as the first meretricious charms, the warm tints of the cheek and 

 the lips, the well-shaped nose, the dainty clothes, prematurely 

 fade, and the lovely toy which once kept groups of hungry-look- 

 ing children gazing long at the shop window is reduced to the 

 naked essence of a doll. A child's constancy to its doll when 

 thus stripped of exterior charms and degraded to the lowest social 

 stratum of dolldom is one of the sweetest and most humorous 

 things in child life. 



And then, what rude, unpromising things are adopted as doll 

 pets ! Mrs. Burnett tells us she once saw a dirty mite sitting on 



* The One I knew the Best of All. 



