To this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of fairy and other tales. These at first, and for some time, have in them more of play than of serious art, and so can be touched on here where we are dealing with the play of young fancy. We see the beginning of such fanciful invention in childish "romancing" which is often started by the sight of some real object. For example, a little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: "Look at that poor ole man, mamma; he has dot (got) a bad leg". Then romancing, as he was now wont to do: "He dot on a very big 'orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. We must make it well." Then after a thoughtful pause: "Mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to I". Later on children of an imaginative turn wax bolder and spin longer stories and create scenes and persons with whom they live in a prolonged companionship. But of this more presently. Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by a more spontaneous play of creative fancy, children's minds often pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the generous but discriminating old gentleman who brings Christmas presents, as well as the beings fashioned by the more original sort of child for himself, these live on just like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments during the day, bringing into the child's life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, and making in many cases, for a time at least, the most real of all realities. I am far from saying that _all_ children make a fancy world for themselves in this way. As I said at the beginning of the chapter the differences among children in this respect are great. Yet I think it is safe to say that most children, and especially lonely children who have not a full active life provided for them by companions and opportunities of adventure, do live a good fraction of their life in dreamland. Where the active life is provided a child is apt to play rather than lose himself passively in fancy dreams. But play, too, is to a large extent a product of the liveliness of the young imagination. We will now glance at it in this light. CHAPTER II. THE ENCHANTMENT OF PLAY.