ed child, which are nothing more than pegs on which he
hangs his glowing fancies, are healthier than our complicated modern
mechanisms, in which the child has only to "press the button" and the
toy "does the rest."

The electric-talking doll, for example--imagine a generation of
children brought up on that! And the toy-makers are not even content
with this grand personage, four feet high, who says "Papa! Mamma!" She
is _passee_ already; they have begun to improve on her! An electrician
described to me the other day a superb new altruistic doll, fitted
to the needs of the present decade. You are to press a judiciously
located button and ask her the test question, which is, if she will
have some candy; whereupon with an angelic detached-movement-smile
(located in the left cheek), she is to answer, "Give brother _big_
piece; give me little piece!" If the thing gets out of order (and I
devoutly hope it will), it will doubtless return to a state of nature,
and horrify the bystanders by remarking, "Give me _big_ piece! Give
brother _little_ piece!"

Think of having a gilded dummy like that given you to amuse yourself
with! Think of having to play,--to _play_, forsooth, with a model of
propriety, a high-minded monstrosity like that! Doesn't it make you
long for your dear old darkey doll with the raveled mouth, and the
stuffing leaking out of her legs; or your beloved Arabella Clarinda
with the broken nose, beautiful even in dissolution,--creatures "not
too bright or good for human nature's daily food"? Banged, battered,
hairless, sharers of our mad joys and reckless sorrows, how we
loved them in their simple ugliness! With what halos of romance we
surrounded them! with what devotion we nursed the one with the broken
head, in those early days when new heads were not to be bought at the
nearest shop. And even if they could have been purchased for us, would
we, the primitive children of those dear, dark ages, have ever thought
of wrenching off the cracked blonde head of Ethelinda and buying a
new, strange, nameless brunette head, gluing it calmly on Ethelinda's
body, as a small acquaintance of mine did last week, apparently
without a single pang? Never! A doll had a personality in those times,
and has yet, to a few simple backwoods souls, even in this day and
generation. Think of Charles Kingsley's song,--"I once had a sweet
little doll, dears." Can we imagine that as written about one of these
modern monstrosities with eyeglas