The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an explanation, then gave it himself: ‘Mr. Fy dom (gone) to by-by’. But he would not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently remained and he continued uneasy about it." Here we have, I think, the instinctive attitude of a child towards the outcome of his destructive impulse. This impulse, which, as we know, becomes more clearly destructive when experience has taught what result will follow, is not necessarily cruel in the sense of including an idea of the animal’s suffering. Animal movement, especially that of tiny things, has something exciting and provoking about it. The child’s own activity and the love of power which is bound up with it impel him to arrest the movements of small manageable things. This is the meaning, I suspect, of the fascination of the fly on the window-pane, and of tiny creeping things, and especially, perhaps, of the worm with its tangle of wriggling movement. The cat’s prolonged chase of the mouse, into which, as we have seen, something of a dramatic make-believe enters, probably owes its zest to a like delight in the realisation of power. Along with this love of power there goes often something of a child’s fierce untamable curiosity. A boy of four, finding that his mother was shocked at hearing him express a wish to see a pigeon which a dog had just killed, remarked: ‘Is it rude to look at a dead pigeon? I want to see where its blood is.’ I am disposed to think that the crushing of flies and moths and the pulling of worms to pieces and so forth are prompted by this curiosity. The child wants to see where the blood is, what the bones are like, how the wings are fastened in, and so forth. Perez tells of a little boy, afterwards an artist, who used to crush flies between the leaves of a book for the sake of the odd designs resulting.[170] By such various lines of concentrated activity does the child-mind overlook the suffering which it causes. ----- Footnote 170: _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant_, p. 60. ----- A like combination of love of power and of curiosity seems to underlie other directions of childish destructiveness, as the breaking of toys and the pulling of flowers to pieces. In certain cases, as in C.’s annihilation of a garden of peonies, the love of power or effect may overtop and outlive the curiosity, becoming a sort of iconoclastic fury.[171] ----- Footnote 171: Ruskin tells us that when a child he pulled flowers to pieces ‘in no morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder’ (_Præterita_, 88). Goethe gives an amusing account of his wholesale throwing of crockery out of the window inspired by the delight of watching the droll way in which it was smashed on the pavement. -----