One of the simplest and most obvious of these contrivances is the extempore invention of an excuse for not instantly obeying a particular command. A child soon finds out that to say ‘I won’t’ when he is bidden to do something is indiscreet as well as vulgar. He wants to have his own way without resorting to a gross breach of good manners, so he replies insinuatingly, ‘I’s very sorry, but I’s too busy,’ or in some such conciliatory words. This field of invention offers a fine opportunity for the imaginative child. A small boy of three years and nine months on receiving from his nurse the familiar order, “Come here!” at once replied, “I can’t, nurse, I’s looking for a flea,” and pretended to be much engrossed in the momentous business of hunting for this quarry in the blanket of his cot.[193] The little trickster is such a lover of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a case like this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told, laughed mischievously as he proffered his excuse. Such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as the uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is hard to be quite as much put out by them. ----- Footnote 193: _Cf._ the excuse given by a little girl of three when her grandmother called her, “I can’t come, I am suckling baby” (the doll). P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 126. ----- These excuses often show a fine range of inventive activity. How manifold, for example, are the reasons, more or less fictitious, which a boy when told to make less noise is able to urge in favour of non-compliance. Here, of course, all the great matters of the play-world, the need of getting his ‘gee-gee’ on, of giving his orders to his soldiers, and so forth, come in between the prohibition and compliance, and disobedience in such cases has its excuses. For to the child his play-world, even though in a manner modelled on the pattern of our common world, is apart and sacred; and the conventional restraints as to noise and such like borrowed from the every-day world seem to him to be quite out of place in this free and private domain of his own.