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 eyeglasses and corsets and vinaigrettes? "I once had a sweet little doll, dears, The prettiest doll in the world, Her face was so red and so white, dears, And her hair was so charmingly curled; But I lost my poor little doll, dears, As I played on the heath one day, And I sought for her more than a week, dears, But I never could find where she lay. "I found my poor little doll, dears, As I played on the heath one day; Folks say she is terribly changed, dears, For her paint is all washed away; And her arms trodden off by the cows, dears, And her hair not the least bit curled; Yet for old sake's sake she is still, dears, The prettiest doll in the world." Long live the doll! "Dolly-o'diamonds, precious lamb, Humming-bird, honey-pot, jewel, jam, Darling delicate-dear-delight-- Angel-o'red, angel-o'white!" "Take away the doll, you erase from the heart and head feelings, images, poetry, aspiration, experience, ready for application to real life."