Her handling of things had long developed into elaborate investigation, turning an object over and examining every side, poking her fingers into crevices, opening and shutting lids, turning over the leaves of books; and now she was no longer satisfied with investigating such objects as she came across by chance--she began to have a passion (which increased for weeks and months, and long made up a great part of her life) to go and find what there was to see. She crept to the window and stood at the low sill, to look out, beating the pane with her soft little hands and laughing in an ecstasy of delight if the dog wandered by. She crept into the hall and explored it, sitting down in each corner to take a survey, and to look up the walls above her. Her toys were neglected; she was impatient of being held in arms, and eager only to get to the floor and use her new powers. She crept happily about for hours from chair to chair, from person to person, getting to her feet at each, and setting herself cleverly down again; smiling and crowing at each success, and coming to us for applause and caresses. She did not want to leave the floor for her meals, and was reconciled to them only if she might stand at her mother’s side and take her milk or porridge in small doses, interspersed with play. She ran away from us on hands and knees, laughing, if she thought we were about to pick her up. Outdoors her happiness was even greater than in the month before, and her cries of rapture as she looked up, down, and around, and realized her own activity in the midst of all the waving and shining and blooming things, were remarkable--uttered, as it were, from the very deeps of her little soul, with that impassioned straining of the central muscles by which a baby throws such abandon of longing or ecstasy into his voice. We seem to have lost the vivid expressiveness of primitive cries in getting the precision and convenience of articulate words. The sights and sounds of outdoors now contributed greatly to the little girl’s joy there. She had for some weeks noticed sounds more than ever before--the tapping of a woodpecker, for instance, or the stamping of a horse in the stable--and now she was quick to look and listen at the note of a bird. She watched the birds, too, for the first time, as they flew from tree to tree; and the profuse California flowers were objects of incessant desire and pleasure.