fades and is forgotten in the growing reality of our outward life, it may not be impossible with practice to regain the proficiency, for at times of great physical fatigue and mental exaltation the power comes back, often intensified almost to the point of hallucination. If we could train our imagination then, and learn to see pictures when our eyes are shut, these might become more accurate and real, so that at the moment of sinking into unconsciousness, as we lose hold on tangible things, the vision would become one with the reality, and, still imagining and creating, we might pass over the footlights and dream true. To most of us there comes a recognizable moment when we know we are just at the border of sleep; if we could then with our last effort of will keep control of the moving pictures we might go wherever we wished.

We might learn, too, to remember more of what happens in the night. We usually give what has passed in dream no more than an indulgent smile, and forget the strangeness of it all as soon as we are well awake. It is as if we had hurriedly turned the pages of an illustrated book. We recall, here and there, a few striking pictures, beautiful or comic, and the volume is replaced upon the shelves not to be taken down till the next evening. It is a book from which we learn little; its contents are not even amusing to anyone else, who has as fanciful tales in his own dreamland library. If we could, upon first awakening, impress our minds with the reality of our dreams, we might be able to recall more and more, and find that in spite of their incongruity there was some law which governed their visitation and some meaning in their grotesque patterns.

To one who dreams frequently, bedtime cannot fail to be something to look forward to, to hope and to prepare for with efforts to capture in the net of sleep some beautiful dream. May we not, sometime, find the proper bait, and lie down confident that we shall be duly enchanted in some delightful way, according to our desires? Till then we must each buy our nightly ticket in Sleep's lottery, and draw a blank or a prize, as Morpheus wills. Some say that the most refreshing sleep is absolute unconsciousness of time--that one should shut one's eyes, only to open them in the morning, with the night all unaccounted for. But no true dreamer will assent to this; he knows it is not so. I was told in my youth, that if I turned the toes of my boots toward the bed, I should have a nightmare. I confess I have never dared try it. But, rather than not dream at all, I believe I should be tempted to hazard the experiment.

The Art of Playing

Time was when we made our own toys; when a piece of twine, a spool, a few nails and a bit of imagination could keep us busy and happy all day long. There were no new-fangled iron toys "made in Germany," so tiresome in their inevitable little routine of performance, so easily got out of order, and so hard, metallic and realistic as to be hardly worth the purchase. A penny would, indeed, buy some funny carved wooden thing that aroused a half-hour's excitement, but it was never quite so alluring as when in the front window of the toy-shop. Such queer animals never became thoroughly acclimated to the nursery, and they lost their lustre in a half-holiday. The things that gave permanent satisfaction were home-made, crude and capable of transformation. A railway train might, with a small effort of the fancy, become a ship or a dragon. Are there such amateur toy-builders now, in this age when everything is perfect and literal, when even a box of building-blocks contains a book of plans to supply imaginative design to the modern child? Indeed, many children are nowayears too lazy even to do their own playing. I have heard of one who was used to sit on a chair and order his nurse to align his ninepins and bowl them down for him!

Perhaps one notices the lack of creative ability in children more in the city where ready-made toys are cheap and accessible, than in the country where the whole world is full of wonderful possibilities for entrancing pastime. Nature is the universal playmate, perpetually parodying herself in miniature for the benefit of those who love to amuse themselves with her toys. Every brook is a little river, every pond an unfathomable sea. She plants tiny forests of fern and raises microscopic mountains in every sand-bank. Flowers and plants furnish provender for Lilliputian groceries, the oak showers acorn cups; what wonder we believe, as long as we can, in fairies?

And yet, strange to say, it is the city more often than the country child who feels the charm of these marvels. The freshness and the strangeness breed a fascinated wonder; it is, after flagged pavements and brick walls, almost too good to be true. The juvenile rustic is more familiar with Nature. It is his business to know when the flowers come, where berries ripen and birds nest. It is scarcely play to him, it is a science to be applied to his personal profit. The woods and rivulets are his familiar domain, to be forayed and hunted specifically for gain. And this, though it is delightful, is not play. For him, there is no glamour over the fields until long after, when his native countryside has become inaccessible.

Perhaps the art of playing is, after all, a matter more of temperament than environment, for one sees, at times, good sport even in the city streets, though it is rare nowadays. I had my own full share of it, for my youth was an age of pure romance. My clan had its own code and its own traditions. Every man of us had his suit of wooden armour, his well-wrought weapons and his fiery steed. We were all for Scott. We had our Order, small, but well up in the technique of feudal ways, facile in sword-play, both with the thin, sinewy hard-pine rapier, and the huge, two-handed, double-hiked battle-sword that should stand just as high as one's head. On the brick sidewalks we tilted on velocipedes, full in the view of the anxious passers-by. Cap-à-pie in pine sheathed with tin, with a shield blazoned with a tiger couchant, and inscribed with a Latin motto out of the back of the dictionary, many a long red lance I shivered, and many a wheel I broke. On Warren Avenue I did it, opposite the church. What would I not give, now, to see such sights in town!--instead, I watch little boys smoking cigarettes upon the street corners, waiting for their girls.

I knew a youngster, too, who organized in his town a postoffice department, established letter-boxes and a regular service of boy carriers. He drew and coloured the stamps himself--you will find them in few collections, though they should have enormous value from their rarity. Such games are consummate play, even though the sport goes awry all too soon; it is too great to last!

It is the older brother who should give finesse to such sport. Without him, complications arise which accomplish at last the ruin of the game. Many of us do not truly learn to play until it is too late to do so with dignity, and to these, the appreciation of the young gives a fine excuse for prolonging the diversion. We fancy we cannot, when grown up, play imaginative games for the pure joy of it, as does the child; we think we must have an ulterior motive. Yet the father, who whittles out a boat for his son, often gets more delight than the child, who would far rather do it himself, no matter how much more crudely accomplished.

The theater is the typical play for grown-ups; the name itself, "play," is significant of the unquenchable tendency of youth. And this reminds me of a most amusing case where two