To insist on this organic connexion between play and art is not to say that every lively player is fitted to become an art-aspirant. The artistic ambition implies too rare a complex of conditions for us to be able to predict its appearance in this way. It may, however, be thrown out as a suggestion to the investigator of the first manifestations of artistic genius that he might do well to cast his eye on the field of imaginative play. It will possibly be found that although not a romping riotous player, nor indeed much disposed to join other children in their pastimes, the original child has his own distinctive style of play, which marks him out as having more than other children of that impulse to dream of far-off things, and to bring them near in the illusion of outer semblance, which enters more or less distinctly into all art. I have left myself no space to speak of the child’s first attempts at art as we understand it. Some of this art-activity, more particularly the earliest weaving of stories, is characteristic enough to deserve a special study. I have made a small collection of early stories, and some of them are interesting enough to quote. Here is a quaint example of the first halting manner of a child of two and a half years as invention tries to get away from the sway of models: “Three little bears went out a walk and they found a stick, and they poked the fire with it, and they poked the fire and then went a walk”. Soon, however, the young fancy is apt to wax bolder, and then we get some fine invention. A boy of five years and a quarter living at the sea-side improvised as follows. He related “that one day he went out on the sea in a lifeboat when suddenly he saw a big whale, and so he jumped down to catch it, but it was so big that he climbed on it and rode on it in the water, and all the little fishes laughed so”. With this comic story may be compared a more serious not to say tragic one from the lips of a girl one month younger, and characterised by an almost equal fondness for the wonderful. “A man wanted to go to heaven before he died. He said, ‘I don’t want to die, and I must see heaven!’ Jesus Christ said he must be patient like other people. He then got _so_ angry, and screamed out as loud as he could, and kicked up his heels as high as he could, and they (the heels) went into the sky, and the sky fell down and broke earth all to pieces. He wanted Jesus Christ to mend the earth again, but he wouldn’t, so this was a good punishment for him.” This last, which is the work of one now grown into womanhood and no longer a story-teller, is interesting in many ways. The wish to go to heaven without dying is, as I know, a motive derived from child-life. The manifestations of displeasure could, one supposes, only have been written by one who was herself experienced in the ways of childish ‘tantrums’. The naïve conception of sky and earth, and lastly the moral issue of the story, are no less instructive.