These days of rapid unfolding were joyous days. The baby laughed aloud more than ever before, and her daily frolics were as necessary to her as her meals, and were fretted for as persistently if she did not get them. The door of communion with fellow beings, too, was trembling on its hinges, ready to come ajar. The little thing began to look up into our faces as if for sympathy in pleasure or perplexity, as I have mentioned in the case of her surprise at discovering the back of her head; she did it laughing when she splashed in the bath, and with smiles of satisfaction when she listened to the piano. When her mother held out her arms to take her, she learned to put forward her little hands in response; and on the same day she took up the instinctive gesture of stretching out her arms toward an object in desire--always, I suspect (records are wanting), the next gesture after turning away the head. Neither of these reaching gestures was as yet used intentionally to convey ideas, but both entered later into genuine sign language. Both seem to grow naturally out of grasping movements. In the baby’s absorption in grasping, most of her little sounds were abandoned; but she clung to a favorite long gurgle, and used it with an air of amiable response when people talked or nodded to her, often kicking her legs in the air or flinging up her arms, by way of emphasis. Sometimes she would look earnestly into your face and address you with the gurgle in all seriousness. Sometimes it would seem to occur to her suddenly, and she would burst out with it, with an impulsive movement of body and limbs. In a few days she had become a different baby, with a new world of interests, and a wonderfully more varied and vivid life. After this, she went on smoothly to the end of the fifth month (and for that matter, through the sixth), absorbed in looking, feeling, and handling, reaching this way and that to lay hold of everything she saw, and improving steadily in skill. A small steel bell given her in the twenty-first week was at first pulled and shoved about on the table, picked up with two fingers or more as might chance, and put into her mouth by any part that came handiest; but in three or four days it was taken up properly and rung. More and more all the time she found something to do with things besides putting them in her mouth. She liked hard, bright, and rattling things best to handle, and preferred metal or bone to rubber. One can hardly think of a thing less useful to a baby educationally at this stage than soft, colored worsted balls; he needs something that he can feel, hard and definite, in his hand; something with distinctly unlike sides that he can see as he pulls and shakes it about; he loves glitter, but cares little for color, perhaps does not yet see it; and any dyes and worsted shreds that can come off in wet little mouths are conclusive against such a toy.