the exercise of
imagination, other children fall naturally into habits of consecutive
thought, or at any rate of consecutive fancy; but these of the labouring
class have hardly any ideas which their young brains could play with,
other than those derived from their own experience of real life in the
valley, or those which they hear spoken of at home. Hence in their
histrionic games of "pretending" it is but a very limited repertory of
parts that they can take. Two or three times I have come upon a little
group of them under a hedgerow or sun-warmed bank, playing at school;
the teacher being delightfully severe, and the scholars delightfully
naughty. And now and again there is a feeble attempt at playing
soldiers. Very often, too, one may see boys, in string harness, happy in
being very mettlesome horses. In one case a subtle variant of this game
inspired two small urchins to what was, perhaps, as good an imaginative
effort as I have met with in the village. The horse, instead of being
frisky, was being slow, so that the driver had to swear at him. And most
vindictive and raucous was the infant voice that I heard saying, "Git
up, you blasted lazy cart-'orse!" Other animals are sometimes
represented. With a realistic grunt, a little boy, beaming all over his
face, said to his companion, "Now I'll be your pig." Another day it
puzzled me to guess what a youngster was doing, as he capered furiously
about the road, wearing his cap pushed back and two short sticks
protruding from beneath it over his forehead; but presently I perceived
that he was a "bullick" being driven to market. Excepting the case
already mentioned, of the boy who proposed to "be a murderer," I do not
recall witnessing any other forms of the game of "pretending" amongst
the village children, unless in the play of little girls with their
dolls. There was one very pretty child who used to prattle to me
sometimes about her "baby," and how it had been "bad," that is to say,
naughty, and put to bed; or had not had its breakfast. This little girl
was an orphan who lived with her grandfather and a middle-aged aunt, and
was much petted by them. She was almost alone too, amongst the village
children of that period, in being the possessor of a doll, for no more
than five or six years ago one rarely saw such a thing in the village.
Christmas-trees have since done something to make up the deficiency. A
month or two ago I saw a four-year-old girl--a friend of mine from a