PART II
CHAPTER I
Romance in Games
A sharp distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply everything, in the former it supplements or corrects the suggestion of the toy. But in both, as in every movement and desire of the natural child, it is imagination which tints the picture and makes the whole enterprise worth while.
In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and still more in its sister "I spy," a little live streak of fear brought down from who knows what wild ancestry lends to the game an excitement not to be found in games with bats and balls and nets and bails and straightforward trappings bought at shops. When you lurk in the shrubbery ready to spring out on the one who is hunting you, and to become in your turn the hunter, you are no longer a child, you are a red Indian or a Canadian settler, or a tiger or a black-fellow, according to the measure of your dreams and the nature of the latest book of your reading.
At this point it occurs to me that perhaps you who read may have forgotten the difference between "Hide-and-seek" and "I spy." Hide-and-seek is just what it says it is; half the players hide, and the others seek them and there's an end of it. It is an interesting game, but flat compared with "I spy." It has, however, this merit, that it can be played without those screams to which grown-ups are, usually, so averse. Whereas I defy any one to play "I spy" without screaming. Hide-and-seek is a calm game; the thing sought for might almost as well be an inanimate object: it is the game of stoats looking for pheasants' eggs, of bears looking for honey. But "I spy" is the game of enemy looking for enemy: it calls for the virtues of fortitude, endurance, courage—for the splendours of physical fitness, for aptness, for speed. In "I spy" half the players hide and the others seek; but they seek not an unresisting stationary object, but a keen, watchful retaliatory terror. They seek, in shrubbery and garden, behind summer-house and conservatory, in the shelter of tree, hedge, and arbour, for the enemy, and when that enemy is found the seeker does not just say, "Oh, here you are"—that ending the game. Far otherwise; the seeker in "I spy" goes warily, his heart in his mouth—for, the moment he sees a hider, he must shout "I spy," adding the hider's name. "I spy Jimmy!" he cries, and turning, flees at his best speed. The hidden one follows after—the hunted becoming in one swift terrible transition the hunter, and he who was the seeker flies with all the speed he may, across country, to the appointed "home." The quarry unearthed has become the pursuer and follows with yells. Grown-ups would always rather that you played hide-and-seek—and can you wonder? But sometimes they will concede to you "I spy" rights, and even join in the sport. It is always well, in playing any game where anything may be trampled, such as asparagus beds, or broken, such as windows, to have a grown-up or two on your side. And by "your," here, of course I mean children. The habit of years is not easily broken, and I am so much more used to writing for children than of them.