"Did you ask her?" I questioned, with much curiosity.
"Yes," answered the child's mother; "but she only smiled, and looked embarrassed, so I said nothing further. She seemed to want to keep her secret, the dear baby! So I thought I'd let her!"
And I—I, too, kept it. "Yes, do let her," was all I said.
American children, when "playing alone," impersonate the heroes and heroines of the dramas they see, or the stories they are told, or the books they read (how much more often they must do it than we suspect our memories of our own childish days will teach us), but when they play together, even when they "play at books that they have read," they seldom "pretend." A group of small boys who have just read "Robin Hood" do not say: "Wouldn't it be fun to play that we are Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and that our grove is Sherwood Forest?" They are more apt to say: "It would be good sport for us—shooting with bows and arrows. We might get some, and fix up a target somewhere and practise." The circle of little girls who have read "Mary's Meadow" do not propose that they play at being Mary. They decide instead upon doing, in their own proper persons, what Mary did in hers. They can play together, the children of our Nation, but they seem unable to "pretend" together. They are perhaps too self-conscious.
It is a significant circumstance that yearly there are published in America a large number of books for children telling them "how to make" various things. A great part of their play consists in making something —from a sunken garden to an air-ship.
I recently had a letter from a boy in which he said: "The boys here are getting wireless sets. We have to buy part of the things; but we make as many of them as we can."
And how assiduously they attempt to make as many as they can of the other things we grown-ups make! They imitate our play; and, in a spirit of play, they contrive to copy to its last and least detail our work. If we play golf or tennis, they also play these games. Are we painters of pictures or writers of books, they too aspire to paint or to write!
It cannot be denied that we encourage the children in this "endless imitation." We not only have diminutive golf sticks and tennis rackets manufactured for their use as soon as they would play our games; when they show signs of toying with our work, we promptly set about providing them with the proper means to that end.
One of our best-known magazines for children devotes every month a considerable number of its pages to stories and poems and drawings contributed by children. Furthermore, it offers even such rewards as we grown-up writers and painters are offered for "available" products. Moreover, the young contributors are instructed in the intricacies of literary and artistic etiquette. They are taught how to prepare manuscripts and drawings for the editorial eye. The "rules" given these children are identical with the regulations governing well-conducted grown-up writers and artists—excepting that the children are commanded to "state age," and "have the contribution submitted indorsed as wholly original!"
It is a noteworthy fact that hundreds of children in America send in contributions, month after month, year after year, to this magazine. Even more significant is it that they prepare these contributions with all the conscientious care of grown-up writers or painters to whom writing or painting is the chiefest reality of life. So whole-heartedly do the children play at being what their elders are!