[ILLUSTRATION: "DID YOU PLAY IT THIS WAY?">[
"My dears," my friend said, "you don't need us; you have your game.
Aren't you happy with it?"
"Why, yes," the little girl admitted; "but we want you to see us being happy!"
Only to-day, as I came up my street, a crowd of small children burst upon me from behind a hedge; and, shouting and gesticulating, surrounded me. Their faces were streaked with red, and blue, and yellow lines, applied with crayons; feathers of various domestic kinds ornamented their hats and caps, and they waved in the air broken laths, presumably gifts from a builder at work in the vicinity.
"We are Indians!" they shrieked; "wild Indians! See our war-paint, and feathers, and tomahawks! We hunt the pale face!"
While I sought about for an appropriate answer to make, my little neighbors suddenly became calm.
"Don't we children have fun?" one of them questioned me. "You like to see us having fun, don't you?"
I agreed, and again their war-whoops began. They followed me to my door in a body. Inside I still heard them playing, but with lessened din. Several times during the afternoon, hearing their noise increase, I looked out; each time I saw that the arrival of another grown-up pale face was the occasion of the climactic moment in the game. In order to be wild Indians with perfect happiness the small players demanded an appreciative audience to see them being happy.
Some of us in America are prone to deprecate in the children of our Nation this pleased consciousness of their own enjoyment, this desire for our presence as sympathetic onlookers at those of their games in which we cannot join. We must not allow ourselves to forget that it is a state of mind fostered largely by our National habit of treating children as familiars and equals. Our satisfaction in their pleasures we mention in their hearing. If they are aware that we like to see them "being happy," it is because we have told them, and told them repeatedly. We do not, as in a former time, "spell some of our words" in their company, in order that they may not know all we say. On the contrary, we pronounce all our words with especial clearness, and even define such as are obscure, that the children not only may, but must, fully understand us when we speak "before them." Unquestionably this takes from the play of the children self-forgetfulness of one kind, but sometimes it gives to them self-forgetfulness of another, a rarer kind.
I know a family of children, lovers of games which involve running races. Several years ago one of the boys of this family died. Since his death the other children run no more races.