It may not be easy to explain fully this stimulating power of words on the childish mind. There is some reason to say that in these early days spoken words as sounds for the ear have in themselves something of the immediate objective reality of all sense-impressions, so that to name a thing is in a sense to make it present. However this be, words as sense-presentations have a powerful suggestive effect on children’s imagination, calling up particularly vivid images of the objects named. The effect is probably aided by the child’s nascent feeling of reverence for another’s words as authoritative utterances. This impulse to realise words makes the child a listener much more frequently than we suppose. How often is the mother surprised and amused at a question put by her child about something said in his presence to a servant, a visitor, or a workman; something which in her grown-up way she assumed would not be of the slightest interest to him. In this manner, words soon become a great power in the new wondering life of a child. They lodge like flying seedlings in the fertile brain, and shoot up into strange imaginative growths. But of this more by-and-by. This profound and lasting effect of words is nowhere more clearly seen than in the spell of the story. We grown-up people are wont to flatter ourselves that we read stories: the child, if he could know what we call reading, would laugh at it. With what deftness does the little brain disentangle the language, often strange and puzzling enough, reducing it by a secret child-art to simplicity and to reality. A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, “I’m afraid you can’t understand it, dear,” for which she got duly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: “Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain”. The explaining is resented because it interrupts the child’s own spontaneous image-building, wherein lies the charm, because it rudely breaks the spell of the illusion, calling off the attention from the vision he sees in the word-crystal, which is all he cares about, to the cold lifeless crystal itself.