This impulse to invent imaginary surroundings, and more especially to create mythical companions, is very common among lonely and imaginative children. A lady friend, a German, tells me that when she was a little girl, a lonely one of course, she invented a kind of _alter ego_, another girl rather older than herself, whom she named ‘Krofa’—why she has forgotten. She made a constant playmate of her, and got all her new ideas from her. Mr. Canton’s little heroine took to nursing an invisible ‘iccle gaal’ (little girl), the image of which she seemed able to project into space.[23] The invention of fictitious persons fills a large space in child-life. Perhaps if only the young imagination is strong enough there is, as already hinted, more of sweet illusion, of a warm grasp of living reality in this solitary play, where fictitious companions perfectly obedient to the little player’s will take the place of less controllable tangible ones. But such purely imaginative make-believe, which derives no help from actual things, is perhaps hardly ‘play’ in the full sense, but rather an active form of day-dreaming or romancing.[24] ----- Footnote 23: _The Invisible Playmate_, p. 33 ff. Footnote 24: I fail to understand what Professor Mark Baldwin means by saying that an only child is wanting in imagination (_op. cit._, p. 358). In his emphasising of the influence of imitation and external suggestion the writer seems to have overlooked the rather obvious fact that childish imagination in its intenser and more energetic forms means a detachment from the sensible world, and that lonely children are, as more than one autobiography, as well as mother’s record, show, particularly imaginative just because of the absence of engaging activities in the real world. -----