ich we cannot join. We must not allow ourselves to forget that it is a
state of mind fostered largely by our National habit of treating
children as familiars and equals. Our satisfaction in their pleasures we
mention in their hearing. If they are aware that we like to see them
"being happy," it is because we have told them, and told them
repeatedly. We do not, as in a former time, "spell some of our words" in
their company, in order that they may not know all we say. On the
contrary, we pronounce all our words with especial clearness, and even
define such as are obscure, that the children not only may, but must,
fully understand us when we speak "before them." Unquestionably this
takes from the play of the children self-forgetfulness of one kind, but
sometimes it gives to them self-forgetfulness of another, a rarer kind.

I know a family of children, lovers of games which involve running
races. Several years ago one of the boys of this family died. Since his
death the other children run no more races.

"We like running races just as much," one of the girls explained to me
one evening, as we sat by the fire and talked about her dead brother;
"but, you know, _he_ always liked them best, because he generally won.
He loved to have mother see him winning. He was always getting her to
come and watch him do it. And mother liked it, and used to tell other
people about it. We don't run races now, because it might remind mother
too much."

No matter how joyously American children may play with their elders, or
with their contemporaries, whatever enhancement their satisfaction in
play with one another may gain from the presence of grown-up spectators,
they are not likely to become so dependent upon the one, nor so self-
conscious by reason of the other, that they will relinquish--or, worse
still, never know--the dear delights of "playing alone." Games played in
company may be the finest prose--they are yet prose; games played alone
are pure poetry. The children of our Nation are not without that
imagination which, on one day or another, impels a child to wander,
"lonely as a cloud," along the path of dreamful, solitary play.

How often a child who, to our eyes, appears to be doing nothing
whatever, is "playing alone" a delectable game! Probably, only once in a
hundred times, and then, by the merest accident, do we discover what
that game is.

Among my child friends there is a little boy who takes great pleasure in
seeing dram