“Making believe,” says Stevenson, “is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book.” And he gives this thoroughly boyish illustration from his own childhood: “When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here an island was still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and traveled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.” In another place he says: “We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our Friday appetite; but I can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have made it more palatable than the best of sauces. To a grown person cold mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant world, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments. But for the child it still is possible to weave an enchantment from eatables; and, if he has but read of a dish in a storybook, it will be heavenly manna to him for a week.” The thing that is behind this making-believe seems to be a certain hunger to _realize life_ to its fullest. Sully gives this winsome anecdote to illustrate the realizing power of play: “One day two sisters said to one another, ‘Let us play being sisters.’ This might well sound insane enough to hasty ears; but is it not really eloquent? To me it suggests that the girls felt they were not realizing their sisterhood, enjoying all the possible sweets of it as they wanted to--perhaps there had been a quarrel and a supervening childish coldness. And they felt too that the way to get this more vivid sense of what they were, or ought to be, one to the other, was by playing the part, by acting a scene in which they would come close to one another in warm, sympathetic fellowship.”