never caught a fish there, but there was
always something about the place that made me think that some day a
wonderful catch would be made there. It was a place that enlivened the
fancy and it illustrates what I mean. There were many other such
breeding-spots for fancy scattered along the miles of river and woodland
which I grew to know so well."

"Don't you consider your play of fancy mentally dangerous?"

"No, not when it comes into the mind with the incoming tide of
experience. There was plenty of reality. We had our discomforts and our
disappointments. We were forced to take into account the causal order
of things. But the mind had a chance to add its part to the fact of
existence. And so it always needs to be. I have been successful as a man
of business in part because of my early use of the gift of imagination.
It is bad to have life all imagination, to carry into adult experiences
the make-believe of childhood, but it is a miserable and destitute
existence for any adult to bring to his work no imagination."

"And you regard your earlier use of imagination as a preparation for
your later use?"

"Indeed I do. I also regard it as the best basis for a reasonable
spiritual interpretation of life. In addition it furnished pleasures,
the memories of which are sweet and wholesome to this day."

"Do city children have no similar opportunity for creating fancy?"

"Perhaps they do, but their imagination is too quickly forced into the
hard forms of adult experience. They feel all too soon the meaning of
wealth, the punishments of poverty. They dream of more of this or less
of that. They covet possession of the things they see from the store
windows or in the yards of more fortunate children. The shadow of the
money-magic of which you spoke falls too soon for their later good
across their path. With the country boy and girl this is not likely to
happen. Their experiences are more buoyant, more interpretive, more
exploring. Fancy creates and reveals; it does not largely furnish the
false pleasures of fictitious possession. This is to me the difference.
The city may be the richest environment for the adult. That is a matter
of opinion. But I cannot see how anyone can think of it as the best
place for the child. I cannot believe that I would have gotten nearly so
much of good from my early experiences if I had lived in the city. If I
am right, this is another element to add to the great urban problem. If
the experience of