148 TlMEHRI. 
natural sportiveness develops. I have lately been 
watching certain Indian children in this half-civilized 
condition. One Ackawoi boy who lives with me, seems 
as playful as any happy English child. One of his 
amusements is to catch a sandwasp, and, having tied to 
it one end of a long fine hair, to the other end of 
which a bright coloured flower or a scrap of paper is 
fastened, to let the insect go again, and then to chase it, 
just sufficiently flower-burdened as it is to prevent its 
either flying too fast or falling too easy a prey. Or this 
same boy amuses himself by stripping the green part 
from a cocoanut leaf leaving only the branched woody 
midrib, and on this he threads innumerable corollas of 
bright flowers, making the whole into a brilliant fan. 
Or, at other times he plaits palm leaves into fantastic 
crowns, or makes of them eccentric boxes and baskets. 
Once, too, at a mission I watched a boy — there appeared 
to be only one who could do it — who running on all fours 
as fast as the others could on their two legs, chased his 
companions and almost invariably caught them, the 
whole party being clamorous, throughout the game, with 
shouts of joy. And at this same mission I once saw the 
children play for a whole evening at a most organized 
game, which they must have been taught ; it was a ver- 
sion of our own childish game of ' oranges and lemons' ; 
each player as he was caught being asked whether he 
would join, not the oranges or the lemons, but the sun 
or the moon. 
Animism. — In our remote forest house, surrounded 
as we are by none but Indians, quaint little instances illus- 
