Even where play has in it nothing alarming it is apt to take on a serious aspect. This has been illustrated in what has been said about the doll and other play-illusions. Most of children's play is imitative of the serious actions of grown-up folk. In nursing her doll the little girl is taking to her domestic duties in the most serious of moods; similarly when the little boy assumes the responsibilities of coachman or other useful functionary. The imitative impulse of childhood is wont in these cases to follow out the correct and prescribed order with punctilious exactness. The doll must be dressed, fed, put to bed, and so forth, with the regularity that obtains in the child's own life; the coachman must hold the whip, urge on the horses, or stop them in the proper orthodox manner. And the same fidelity to model and prescription shows itself in those games which reproduce the page of fiction. Here again Tom Sawyer is an excellent example. The way in which that leader of boys lays down the law to Huckleberry Finn when they play at pirates or at Robin Hood and his merry men illustrates forcibly this serious aspect of play. PART II. AT WORK. CHAPTER III. ATTACKING OUR LANGUAGE. No part of the life of a child appeals to us more powerfully perhaps than the first use of our language. The small person's first efforts in linguistics win us by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse they disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full fruition of human intercourse. The difficulties, too, which we manage to lay upon the young learner of our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half humorous, to this field of infantile activity. A child first begins to work in downright earnest when he tries to master these difficulties. As we are here studying the child at an age when he has acquired a certain hold on human speech, I shall make no attempt to describe the babbling of the first months which precedes true speech. For the same reason I shall have to pass by the interesting beginnings of sign-making, and shall only just touch the first stages of articulate performance. All this is, I think, deeply interesting, but it cannot be adequately dealt with here, and I have fully dealt with it in my larger work. The first difficulty which our little linguist has to encounter is the mechanical one of reproducing, with a recognisable measure of approximation, our verbal sounds. What a very rough approximation it is at first, all mothers know. When, for example, a child expects you to translate his sound "koppa" into "Tommy," or "pots" into "hippopotamus," it will be acknowledged that he is making heavy demands. Yet though he causes us difficulties in this way he does so because he finds himself in difficulties. His articulatory organ cannot master the terrible words we put in his way, and he is driven to these short cuts and other make-shifts. _The Namer of Things._