And you’ll agree with me that it’s as clear as daylight, and it all comes to this: if you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. Because of course they only invent games when they have none ready-made for them, like richer folks have--when, in other words, they’ve nothing in their hands. As Mr. Perkins said: “You can’t play a ball-game, if you haven’t got a ball”, meaning that if you want to play, and have nothing to play with, you must play at something that doesn’t need anything. Give them bats and balls, and they soon forget their CHINESE ORDERS, and there’s an end of SHOWING NO IVORY, and nobody thinks of PULLING OUT FATHER’S RHUBARB, and OLD DEVIL may go to--well, where he came from. That’s what keeps them alive and “imaginative” (as Aunt Eliza would say)--having nothing to play with. That’s what makes them use up all they can find--clay and kerbstones and nuts and winkle-shells and clothes and empty condensed-milk tins and walls and caps and stones and window-sills and buttons and doorsteps and lamp-posts and rags and anything else that comes handy. And that’s how they come to play any number of games and to discover new ones every day, while better-class lads get into grooves and go on with their frowsy old cricket and one or two more all the time, always the same, year after year. Not that I’m saying anything against CRICKET in particular. You can do many things with a bat. But there are many more things you can’t do. And all these other things are bound to be left outside your reach in the long run, if you get taken up by cricket. Because, you see, you don’t take up cricket--you think you do, but you don’t; you get taken up. You think you are going to do what you please with a bat, but the fact is, the bat does what it pleases with you; you think it’s your servant, but in reality it’s a master who drives you along the way he means to go--or rather, the only way he can go (that is, hitting a ball). It’s perfectly true that you can play well or badly; but, play as you like, you can’t help your faculty for inventing something outside bats and balls getting rustier all the time. And it’s true that cricket saves you the trouble of inventing those other games; that’s just its drawback, I say. No getting out of the rut! With the bat in your hand, you can only do what it allows you to do. Which is a good deal; but not half as much as if your hand were empty. And what Mr. P. said of ball-games applies to all the others that are played with _things_. Say you want to have a go at WRIGGLY-WORM. Right! But you can’t mark out a pattern in chalk if you have no chalk to do it with. That’s clear. And you haven’t always got a lump of chalk in your pocket; now, have you? And then you feel about and turn them inside out and find you have not only no chalk but nothing else--absolutely nothing at all; not a top or a marble, no, not even a konker or a nicker or a bus-ticket. And then?