The passionate interest in stories means more than this however. It means that the little brain is wondrously deft at disentangling our rather hard language and reducing the underlying ideas to an intelligible simplicity. A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, "I'm afraid you can't understand it, dear," for which she got rather roughly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: "Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain". The "explaining" is resented because it interrupts the child's own secret art of "making something" out of our words. And what glorious inner visions the skilful little interpreter often manages to get from these troublesome words of ours. Scene after scene of the dissolving view unfolds itself in definite outline and magical colouring. At each stage the anticipation of the next undiscernible stage is a thrilling mystery. Perhaps no one has given us a better account of the state of dream-like absorption in storyland than Thackeray. In one of his delightful "Roundabout Papers," he thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood: "Hush! I never read quite to the end of my first _Scottish Chiefs_. I couldn't. I peeped in an alarmed furtive manner at some of the closing pages.... Oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open tarts of budding boyhood! Do I forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page more of my dear Walter Scott--and down came the monitor's dictionary on my head!" The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist a child's hungry demand for a story? and after you have satisfied his first request, he will ask for more, and if then you are weak enough to say you know no more stories he will catch you by answering: "Tell me the same again". As a result of the intensity with which a child's imagination seizes on a narrative it tends to become afterwards a record of fact, a true history. That children look at their stories in this way till they get undeceived seems to be shown by the respect which they pay to the details and even to the words. Woe to the unfortunate mother who in repeating one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One such, a friend of mine, when relating "Puss in Boots" inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by a sharp volley of "Noes!" As the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. It has added to the child's self-created world new territory, in which he may wander and live blissful moments. This permanent occupation of storyland is shown in the child's impulse to bring the figures of story-books into the actual surroundings. It is shown, too, in his fondness for introducing them into his play, of which I shall speak presently.