What black-headed puppets or dolls could be made from the great poppies, whose reflexed petals formed gay scarlet petticoats; and also from the blossoms of vari-colored double balsams, with their frills and flounces! The hollyhock, ever ready to render to the child a new pleasure, could be tied into tiny dolls with shining satin gowns, true fairies. Families--nay, tribes of patriarchal size had the little garden-mother. Mertensia, or lungwort, we termed "pink and blue ladies." The lovely blossoms, which so delighted the English naturalist Wallace, and which he called "drooping porcelain-blue bells," are shaped something like a child's straight-waisted, full-skirted frock. If pins are stuck upright in a piece of wood, the little blue silken frocks can be hung over them, and the green calyx looks like a tiny hat. A child friend forbidden to play with dolls on the solemn New England Sabbath was permitted to gather the mertensia bells on that holy day, and also to use the cherished income of a prosperous pin store. It was discovered with maternal horror that she had carefully arranged her pink and blue ladies in quadrilles and contra-dances, and was very cheerfully playing dancing party, to beguile the hours of a weary summer Sunday afternoon. [Illustration: Playing Marbles] Mr. Tylor, the author of _Primitive Culture_, call our attention to the fact that many of the beloved plays of children are only sportive imitations of the serious business of life. In some cases the game has outlived the serious practice of which it is a copy--such as the use of bows and arrows. Children love to produce these imitations themselves with what materials they can obtain, not to have them provided in finished perfection. Thus the elaborately fitted-up doll's house and imitation grocery store cannot keep the child contented for days and weeks as can the doll's room or shop counter furnished by the makeshifts of the garden. The child makes her cups and saucers and furniture herself. She prepares her own powders and distillations and is satisfied. A harvest of acorn cups furnished table garniture, but not a cherished one; they were too substantial; we preferred more fragile, more perishable wares. Rose-hips were fashioned into tiny tea-sets, and would not be thought to be of great durability. A few years ago I was present at the opening of an ancient chest which had not been thoroughly searched for many years. In a tiny box within it was found some cherished belongings of a little child who had died in the year 1794. Among them was one of these tea-sets made of rose-hips, with handles of bent pins. Though shrunken and withered, the rose-hips still possessed some life color, but they soon fell into dust. There was something most tender in the thought of that loving mother, who had herself been dead over half a century, who had thus preserved the childish work of her beloved daughter.