mind.

This witchcraft of the young fancy in veiling and transforming the actual surroundings is a good deal restrained by the practical needs of every-day life and by intercourse with older and graver folk. There are, however, regions of child-life where it knows no check. One of these is child's play, to be spoken of presently: another is the filling up of the blank spaces in the visible world with the products of fancy. We will call these regions on which the young wing of fancy is wont to alight and rest, fancy's resting-places.

Fancy's Resting-places.

Most people, perhaps, can recall from their childhood the pleasure of cloud-gazing. The clouds are such strange-looking things, they change their forms so quickly, they seem to be doing so many things, now slumbering lazily, now rushing wildly on. Cloud-land is safe away from the scrutiny of fingers, so we never can be sure what they would be if we got to them. Some children take fright at their big, strange forms and their weird transformations: but a happy child that loves day-dreaming will spend many delightful hours in fashioning these forms into wondrous and delightful things, such as kings and queens, giants and dwarfs, beautiful castles, armies marching to battle, or driven in flight, pirates sailing over fair isle-dotted seas. There is a delicious satisfaction to young minds in thus finding a habitation for their cherished images. To project them in this way into the visible world, to know that they are located in that spot before the eye, is to "realise" them, in the sense of giving them the fullest possible reality.

Next to the cloud-world come distant parts of the terrestrial scene. The chain of hills, perhaps, faintly visible from the home, has been again and again endowed by a child's fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. At times when they have shown a soft blue, he has made fairy-land of them; at other times when standing out black and fierce-looking against the western sky at eventide, he has half shuddered at them, peopling them with horrid monsters.

Best of all, I think, for this locating of images, are the hidden spaces of the visible world. One child used to wonder what was hidden behind a long stretch of wood which closed in a good part of his horizon. Many a child has had his day-dreams about the country lying beyond the hills on the horizon. One little girl who lived on a cattle-station in Australia used to locate beyond a low range of hills a family of children whom she called her little girls, and about whom she related endless stories.

With timid children this tendency to project images into unseen places becomes a fearful kind of wonder, not altogether unpleasant when confined to a moderate intensity. I remember the look of awe on the face of a small boy whose hand I held as we passed one summer evening a dark wood, and he whispered to me that the wolves lived in that wood.

This impulse of timid children to project their dark fancies into obscure and hidden places often stops short at vague undefinable conjecture. "When (writes a German author) I was a child and we played hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might be something unheard of hidden away behind every bundle of straw, and in the corners." Here we can hardly speak of a housing of images: at such a moment perhaps the little brain has such a rush of weird images that no one grows distinct.

The exact opposite of this is where a child has a very definite image in his mind, and wants to find a home for it in the external world. This wish seems to be particularly active in relation to the images derived from stories. This housing instinct is strong in the case of the poor houseless fairies. One little boy put his fairies in the wall of his bedroom, where, I suppose, he found it convenient to reach them by his prayers. His sister located a fairy in a hole in a smallish stone.

As with the fancies born of fairy-tales, so with the images of humbler human personages known by way of books. Charles Dickens, when a child, had a strong impulse to locate the characters of his stories in the immediate surroundings. He tells us that "every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (Roderic Random, Tom Jones, Gil Blas, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate."

In Storyland.

The reference to stories naturally brings us to another domain of children's imagination: the new world opened up by their story-books, which is all strange and far away from the nursery where they sit and listen, and in which, nevertheless, they manage in a sense to live and make a new home.

How is it, one is disposed to ask, that most children, at any rate, have their imagination laid hold of, and fired to a white heat, by mere words? To watch the small listener in its low chair, with head raised, eyes fixed, and hands clasped, drinking in every word of your story, giving sign by occasional self-cuddling and other spasmodic movements of the almost overpowering delight which fills its breast, is to be face to face with what is a mystery to most "grown-ups". Perhaps we elders, who are apt to think that we have acquired all the knowledge and to forget how much we have lost, will never understand the spell of a story for the lively impressionable brain of a child. One thing, however, is pretty certain: our words have a way of calling up in children's minds very vivid and very real images of things, images quite unlike those which are called up in the minds of most older people. This magic power of a word to summon the corresponding image, has, I suspect, a good deal to do with a child's intense way of realising his stories.

The passionate interest in stories means more than this however. It means that the little brain is wondrously deft at disentangling our rather hard language and reducing the underlying ideas to an intelligible simplicity. A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, "I'm afraid you can't understand it, dear," for which she got rather roughly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: "Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain". The "explaining" is resented because it interrupts the child's own secret art of "making something" out of our words.

And what glorious inner visions the skilful little interpreter often manages to get from these troublesome words of ours. Scene after scene of the dissolving view unfolds itself in definite outline and magical colouring. At each stage the anticipation of the next undiscernible stage is a thrilling mystery. Perhaps no one has given us a better account of the state of dream-like absorption in storyland than Thackeray. In one of his delightful "Roundabout Papers," he thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood: "Hush! I never read quite to the end of my first Scottish Chiefs. I couldn't. I peeped in an alarmed furtive manner at some of the closing pages.... Oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open tarts of budding boyhood! Do I forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page more of my dear Walter Scott—and down came the monitor's dictionary on my head!"

The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist a child's hungry demand for a story? and after you have satisfied his first request, he will ask for