Unconscious action and selection by children have no doubt profoundly influenced individual men and society at times. De Quincey tells us that "the celebrated Dr. Doddridge is said to have been guided in a primary act of choice, influencing his whole after life, by a few chance words from a child reading aloud to his mother." The story of the conversion of drunken John Stirling by the naïve remark of his four-year-old boy, as the mother was reading Matthew xxv. 31-33, "Will father be a goat, then, mother?" finds parallels in other lives and other lands (191.356). Here may be considered as belonging some of the "guessing-games," certain of which, in forms remarkably like those in use to-day, were known to the ancients, as Mr. Newell has pointed out, from references in Xenophon and Petronius Arbiter (313. 147-152). _Oracular Games_. As we of to-day see in the sports and games of children some resemblance to the realities of life of our ancestors of long ago, and of those primitive peoples who have lingered behind in the march, of culture, so have the folk seen in them some echo, some oracular reverberation, of the deeds of absent elders, some forecast of the things to come. Among the Shushwap Indians of British Columbia, the following belief is current regarding twins: "While they are children their mother can see by their plays whether her husband, when he is out hunting, will be successful or not. When the twins play about and feign to bite each other, he will be successful; if they keep quiet, he will return empty-handed" (404. 92). In Saxon Transylvania, "when children play games in which dolls and the like are buried, play church, or sing hymns in the street, it is thought to foretell the approaching death of some one in the place" (392 (1893).18). Similar superstitions attach to others of the games and sports of childhood, in which is reproduced the solemn earnest of an earlier manhood; for, with some peoples, the conviction that what is acted in pantomime must occur at a later date in all its reality, finds ready acceptance, and hence children are sometimes even now debarred from carrying out some of their games, from a vague fear that ill will come of them in the manner indicated. CHAPTER XXI. THE CHILD AS WEATHER-MAKER. Rain, rain, go away, Come again, another day.--_Children's Rhyme._