Things grow a great deal worse when we try to throw our scientific lassoo about the elusive spirit of a child of four or six, and to catch the exact meaning of its swiftly changing movements. Children are, no doubt, at this age frank before the eye of love, and their minds are vastly more accessible than that of the dumb dog that can only look his ardent thoughts. Yet they are by no means so open to view as is often supposed. All kinds of shy reticences hamper them: they feel unskilled in using our cumbrous language; they soon find out that their thoughts are not as ours, but often make us laugh. And how carefully are they wont to hide from our sight their nameless terrors, physical and moral. Much of the deeper childish experience can only reach us, if at all, years after it is over, through the faulty medium of adult memory—faulty even when it is the memory of a Goethe, a George Sand, a Robert Louis Stevenson.[5] ----- Footnote 5: In these days of published reminiscences of childhood it is quite refreshing to meet with a book like Mr. James Payn’s _Gleams of Memory_, which honestly confesses that its early recollections are almost _nil_. ----- Even when there is perfect candour, and the little one does his best to instruct us as to what is passing in his mind by his ‘whys’ and his ‘I ’sposes,’ accompanied by the most eloquent of looks, we find ourselves ever and again unequal to comprehending. Child-thought follows its own paths—roads, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling has well said, “unknown to those who have left childhood behind”. The dark sayings of childhood, as when a child asks, ‘Why am I not somebody else?’ will be fully illustrated below. This being so, it might well seem arrogant to speak of any ‘scientific’ investigation of the child’s mind; and, to be candid, I may as well confess that, in spite of some recently published highly hopeful forecasts of what child-psychology is going to do for us, I think we are a long way off from a perfectly scientific account of it. Our so-called theories of children’s mental activity has so often been hasty generalisations from imperfect observation. Children are probably much more diverse in their ways of thinking and feeling than our theories suppose. But of this more presently. Even where we meet with a common and comparatively prominent trait, we are far as yet from having a perfect comprehension of it. I at least believe that children’s play, about which so much has confidently been written, is but imperfectly understood. Is it serious business, half-conscious make-believe, more than half-conscious acting, or, no one of these, or all of them by turns? I think he would be a bold man who ventured to answer this question straight away.