At that time there were no amusements especially provided for children, no children’s books, and no Sunday schools to teach bright little songs and to give children picnics and presents. It was a grown people’s world. The toys of the period were so poor and so few that, in comparison with our modern profusion, they could scarcely be said to exist. Harriet was, however, not without some home-made toys, and we are glad to believe that a doll baby, though perhaps only a rag one, was, in the course of providential events, assigned to little, human-hearted Harriet Beecher. We know that Harriet’s older sister Catherine was a master hand at making dolls. With scissors, needle, paint and other materials she could make dolls of all sizes, sexes and colors, and surround them with all sorts of droll contrivances. For instance, she once made a Queen of Sheba with a gold crown, seated her in a chariot made of half a pumpkin drawn by four prancing steeds fashioned out of crook-necked squashes, whose ears and legs she whittled out and fastened securely in their proper places. Then she manufactured a negro driver and placed him above with the reins in hand. Her care and artistry were rewarded by the admiration and amusement of the whole family. It was certainly worth a great deal to the little Harriet to have a sister like that, and we believe that the exercise of Catherine’s talents was not wholly selfish. In “Poganuc People,” Mrs. Stowe, remembering her own childhood well, gives to the young heroine a gorgeous wooden doll with staring glass eyes. This precious treasure was the central point in all _Dolly’s_ arrangements. To this companion _Dolly_ showed her stores of chestnuts and walnuts, gave jay-bird feathers and bluebird’s wings, and a set of tea cups made out of the backbone of a codfish. She brushed and curled the doll’s hair till she took all the curl out of it, and washed all the paint off its cheeks in her motherly zeal. Besides her doll and its excellent codfish backbone tea-set--and no one who has not tried to make them, by the way, can know how beautiful and delicate such tea cups can be--Harriet had in her earliest play days an unfailing source of occupation and delight in the gigantic woodpile in the back yard where the fuel for the season was laid up in long rows eight or ten feet high. Here was a world of marvels. The child skipped and sung and climbed among its intricacies, finding and collecting wonderful treasures, green velvet mosses, little white trees of lichen that seemed to have tiny apples upon them, fine scarlet cups and fairy caps. From these materials she constructed miniature landscapes in which the mosses made the fields, little sprigs of spruce and ground pine the trees, and bits of broken glass the lakes and rivers, reflecting the overshadowing banks.