When this first simple creed gets corrected, children go to work to put a meaning into what is told them by their instructors. Thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are wont to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. Some hard thinking is carried out by the young heads in the effort to reconcile the various things they learn about the celestial region. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as _thin_, probably by way of explaining the light of the stars and moon, which is supposed to shine through the sky-roof. One American child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one part is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through a sort of semi-transparent curtain. Others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half "buttoned" into the sky. Characteristic movements of childish thought show themselves in framing ideas of the making of the world. The boy of four described by Mrs. Jardine thought that the stars were "cut out" first, and that then the little bits left over were all rolled into the moon. Such an idea of cosmogony seems nonsense till one remembers the work of cutting out the finer figures in paper. In much the same way children try to understand the movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies by help of the familiar movements of terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by American children to fly, to be blown, perhaps like a soap-bubble or air-ball, and, by a child with a more mechanical turn, to roll, presumably as a hoop rolls, and so forth. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into the service of childish explanation, as when the disappearance of the sun is ascribed to God's pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and the like. The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for describing the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of as the noise made by God when groaning, when walking heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals "run in"--ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God's lighting the gas, or striking many matches at once. By a similar use of familiar household operations God is supposed to cause rain by turning on a tap, or by letting it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, by passing it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[7]