Along with this rudiment of merry appreciation of the spectacle of the incongruous, we have the first crude manifestation of the closely related feeling of amusement at the absurd. Children are said to have no measure of the probable and possible, and to accept the wildest fancies in {217} unquestioning faith. Yet experience begins her educative work during these first three years, and one may detect sporadic traces of a feeling for what is gloriously incredible. A boy, already alluded to, aged about one and a half year, laughed as his aunt asked him what the waves, which he was gravely observing, were saying. The boy C., when twenty-two months old, grew quite hilarious over the idea of flying up into the air. Some one had suggested his flying like a bird, and he proceeded to cap the suggestion, adding, “Tit (sister) fy air,” “gee-gee (horse) fy air”. The last idea of a flying horse especially delighted one innocent, as yet, of Greek mythology. Lastly, a bare allusion may be made to the early development of an appreciation of word-play and the lighter kind of wit. That this grows out of the play-element, the love of pretence, is at once evident. Verbal fun, “trying it on” with an incorrect use of words and so forth, is a common outlet of the rollicking spirits of childhood. Mrs. Hogan’s boy, at the age of one year eight months, developed a fancy for calling things by their wrong names, a knife a “fork,” for example. Ruth did the same towards the end of the third year. The fun derived from punning seems to be immense in the case of many children at the close of our period, as when a boy on hearing his mother say she had just called on Mrs. Fawkes asked, “Did you call on Mrs. knives too?” This easy childish mode of satisfying a jocose bent is seen also in the use of false statements, not seriously, but “in fun,” as the child has it. Ruth had a fit of such merry fibbing at the end of the third year. A child will often “try on” this kind of verbal game, when called up for a moral lesson.[136] This same roguish impulse to “try it on” with the {218} authorities leads to something like a play of wit in repartee. The merry interchange of intellectual attack and defence, which relieves so many serious relations of adult life, grows naturally enough in the case of children out of their relation of subjection to the grown-ups. The playful experiment in the direction of disobedience is frequently accompanied by pretty exercises in verbal fencing, the joke of which the perpetrator himself, at any rate, greatly enjoys. Such sportive dialectic may arise, too, by way of meeting serious correction. A girl of two and a quarter years was told by a foolish nurse that if she put out her tongue she would get spots on her face. After listening gravely she turned on her instructress and, putting her finger on a little pimple on the latter’s chin, asked with “a most mirthful smile,” “How Lizzie (the nurse) det dat ’pot dere den?”