There is no need of reading into this laughter the note of cruel exultation over suffering.[128] Ruth’s mischievous doings would take forms which had not even the semblance of cruelty. There was merely impish playfulness in the act of snatching off her grandmother’s spectacles and even her cap, with full accompaniment of laughter, in the twenty-second month when lifted to say good-night. In much the same spirit the other little girl, M., delighted, when two years old, in untying the maid’s apron strings and in other jocose forms of mischief. The laughing mood in these cases is understandable as a rioting in newly realised powers, a growing exultation as the consciousness of ability to produce striking effects grows clearer. Ruth, in her eleventh month, blew a whistle violently and looked round laughing to her aunt and the others present. Here, surely, the laughter was that of {203} rejoicing in a new power. This sense of power implies a clearer form of “self-feeling”. A child may grow keenly conscious of the self in such moments of newly tried powers, as he grows in “the moments of intense pain”. This laughter, then, furnishes a good illustration of the sudden glory on which Hobbes lays emphasis. I have assumed that in this laughing mischief we have to do with a form of (playful) teasing. The little assailant enjoys the fun of the attack and counts on your enjoying it also. The indulgence of others, even if they do not show an equal readiness for the pastime, removes all thought of disobedience, of lawlessness. Yet things do not commonly remain at this point of perfectly innocent fun. The gathering energies of the child, encouraged by indulgence in games of romp, are pretty certain to develop distinctly rowdyish proceedings. Ruth, for example, when about twenty-one months old, scrambled defiantly on to the table at the close of a meal, seized on the salts, and scampered about laughing. About the same time this new spirit of rowdyism showed itself in flinging a plate across the room and other mutinous acts. Little boys, I suspect, are much given to experiments in a violent kind of fun which they know to be disorderly. One of them, aged two years eight and a half months, was fond of “trying it on” by pulling hair-pins out of his mother’s hair, splashing in the puddles in the road, and so forth, to her great perplexity and his plainly pronounced enjoyment.