I handed her the book, and she pored over it for a long time. "The houses then were not like the houses now--were they?" she said; "and the people dressed in funny clothes." The next Saturday, at an early hour, I heard beneath my window a childish voice singing a kindergarten song. I peeped out. There stood my little friend. I was careful to make no sound and to keep well in the shadow. The small girl finished her song, and softly ran away. "Your little girl serenaded me the other morning," I said to her mother when I saw her a few days afterward. The child had shown so slight an interest in anything in my book except the pictures that I did not yet connect her singing with it. "You, too!" exclaimed the little girl's mother. "She evidently serenaded the entire neighborhood! All day Saturday, her only holiday, she went around, singing under various windows! I wonder what put the idea into her head." "Did you ask her?" I questioned, with much curiosity. "Yes," answered the child's mother; "but she only smiled, and looked embarrassed, so I said nothing further. She seemed to want to keep her secret, the dear baby! So I thought I'd let her!" And I--I, too, kept it. "Yes, do let her," was all I said. American children, when "playing alone," impersonate the heroes and heroines of the dramas they see, or the stories they are told, or the books they read (how much more often they must do it than we suspect our memories of our own childish days will teach us), but when they play together, even when they "play at books that they have read," they seldom "pretend." A group of small boys who have just read "Robin Hood" do not say: "Wouldn't it be fun to play that _we_ are Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and that our grove is Sherwood Forest?" They are more apt to say: "It would be good sport for _us_--shooting with bows and arrows. We might get some, and fix up a target somewhere and practise." The circle of little girls who have read "Mary's Meadow" do not propose that they play at being Mary. They decide instead upon doing, in their own proper persons, what Mary did in hers. They can play together, the children of our Nation, but they seem unable to "pretend" together. They are perhaps too self-conscious. It is a significant circumstance that yearly there are published in America a large number of books for children telling them "how to make" various things. A great part of their play consists in making something --from a sunken garden to an air-ship. I recently had a letter from a boy in which he said: "The boys here are getting wireless sets. We have to buy part of the things; but we make as many of them as we can."