The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, the child’s intercourse with his doll and his toy ‘gee gee’ is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude which is at once tender and corrective and has the enduring constancy of a maternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a doll, the wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, to make it look pretty, and to get it to behave nicely, and note the misery when it is missing, without acknowledging that in this plaything humanised by childish fancy, and brought by daily habit into the warmest intimacy of daily companionship, we have the focal meeting-point of the tender impulses of the child. Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects in the inanimate world. The manifestations of pity for the falling leaves and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, referred to above, show how quick childish feeling is to detect what is sad in the look of things. Children have even been known to apply the commiserating vocable ‘poor’ to a torn paper figure, and to a bent pin. It seems fair to suppose that here, too, the more tender heart of the child saw occasion for pity. It is worth noting that childish sorrow at the sufferings of things is sometimes so keen, that even artistic descriptions which contain a ‘cruel’ element are shunned. A little boy under four "is indignant (writes his mother) at any picture where an animal suffers. He has even turned against several of his favourite pictures—German Bilderbogen, because they are ‘cruel,’ as the bear led home with a corkscrew in his nose." The extreme manifestation of this shrinking from the representation of animal or human suffering is dislike for ‘sad stories’. The unsophisticated tender heart of the child can find no pleasure in horrors which appear to be the supreme delight of many an adult reader. Here, however, it is evident, we verge on the confines of sentimental pity. It is to be remarked that highly imaginative children shed most tears over these fictitious sufferings. Children with more matter-of-fact minds and a practical turn are not so affected. Thus a mother writes of her two girls: ‘M. being the most imaginative is and always has been much affected by sad stories, especially if read to her with dramatic inflexions of voice. From two years old upwards these have always affected her to tears, whilst P. who is really the most tender-hearted and helpful, but has little imagination, never cries at sad stories, and when four years old explained to me that she did not mind them because she knew they didn’t really happen.’