being. Remember that they speak to his feelings
when his mind is not yet open to reason. The toy at this period is
surrounded with a halo of poetry and mystery, and lays hold of the
imagination and the heart without awaking vulgar curiosity. Thrice
happy age when one can hug one's white woolly lamb to one's bibbed
breast, kiss its pink bead eyes in irrational ecstasy, and manipulate
the squeak in its foreground without desire to explore the cause
thereof!

At this period the well-beloved toy, the dumb sharer of the child's
joys and sorrows, becomes the nucleus of a thousand enterprises, each
rendered more fascinating by its presence and sympathy. If the toy be
a horse, they take imaginary journeys together, and the road is doubly
delightful because never traveled alone. If it be a house, the child
lives therein a different life for every day in the week; for
no monarch alive is so all-powerful as he whose throne is the
imagination. Little tin soldier, Shem, Ham, and Japhet from the Noah's
Ark, the hornless cow, the tailless dog, and the elephant that won't
stand up, these play their allotted parts in his innocent comedies,
and meanwhile he grows steadily in sympathy and in comprehension
of the ever-widening circle of human relationships. "When we have
restored playthings to their place in education--a place which assigns
them the principal part in the development of human sympathies, we can
later on put in the hands of children objects whose impressions will
reach their minds more particularly."

Dr. E. Seguin, our Commissioner of Education to the Universal
Exhibition at Vienna, philosophizes most charmingly on children's toys
in his Report (chapter on the Training of Special Senses). He says the
vast array of playthings (separated by nationalities) left at first
sight an impression of silly sameness; but that a second look
"discovered in them particular characters, as of national
idiosyncrasies; and a closer examination showed that these puerilities
had sense enough in them, not only to disclose the movements of the
mind, but to predict what is to follow."

He classifies the toys exhibited, and in so doing gives us delightful
and valuable generalizations, some of which I will quote:--

"Chinese and Japanese toys innumerable, as was to have been expected.
Japanese toys much brighter, the dolls relieved in gold and gaudy
colors, absolutely saucy. The application of the natural and
mechanical forces in their toys can