While play in its absorbing moments, and even afterwards, may thus produce a genuine illusion, the state of perfect realisation is of course apt to be broken by intervals of scepticism. This has already been illustrated in the case of the doll. The same little boy that played with the imaginary mice was sitting on his stool pretending to smoke like his grandpapa out of a bit of bent cardboard. Suddenly his face clouded over; he stroked his chin, and remarked in a disappointed tone, "I have not got any whiskers". The dream of full manhood was here rudely dispelled by a recall to reality. A measure of the same fanciful transformation of things that has been illustrated in make-believe play, a measure, too, of the illusion which frequently accompanies it, enters, I believe, into all children's pastimes. Whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of the hoop? Is not the interest here due to the circumstance that the child controls a thing which in the freedom of its movements suggests that it has a will of its own? This seems borne out by the following story. A little girl of five once stopped trundling her hoop and said to her mother she thought that her hoop must be alive, because "it is so sensible; it goes where I want it to". Perhaps the same thing may be said of other toys, as the kite and the sailing boat. _Serious Side of Play._ I have here treated the whole realm of childish fancy as one of play, as one in which happy childhood finds its own sunny world. Yet it is clear that this is after all only one side of children's dream-world. Like our own world it has its climates, and if fancy is often frolicsome and games deliciously sweet, they sometimes become serious to the point of a quite dreadful solemnity. That children's imagination is wont to hover, with something of the fascination of the moth, on the confines of the fearful, is known to us all. Some children, no doubt, have much more of the passion for the gruesome and blood-curdling than others, since temperament counts for much here; yet it is pretty safe to say that most know something of this horrible fascination. Dreams, whether of the night or of the day, are not always of beautiful fairies and the like. Weird, awful-looking figures have a way of pushing themselves into the front of the scene. Especially when the "tone" of the frail young nerves runs down from poor health do these alarming shapes appear, and acquire a mighty hold on the child's imagination. Of the timidity of the early years of life I shall have more to say by-and-by. Here I want to bring out how the very vividness of children's images exposes them to what is sometimes at least their worst form of suffering.