This kind of play is individualistic at the beginning and gradually becomes social. By and by the little child wishes for comradeship. If he has no human companions, he usually engages in the pathetic make-believe of inventing an imaginary playmate, with whom he often lives continuously. This sort of expression is as ancient as it is universal. The toys with which children have rebuilt an ideal world have been discovered in the ruins of every buried city. Children show this faculty of imagining themselves other persons in other circumstances not only in play, but in story-telling. It seems to be true that a child imagines himself the hero of every story that he hears or reads, and every normal child acts out afterward most of the stories he hears or the drama he witnesses. “Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves,” says Stevenson; “some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experiences; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.” Many children go even further and perform continuations of such dramas of their own invention, or play for an entire winter successive chapters of a favorite story. Another way of creating a world of fancy is by playing grown-up. This is, of course, a reproduction, as far as the child’s powers permit, of literal adult activities, with, however, somewhat more of the imaginative element. Dr. G. Stanley Hall calls attention to the fact that, while little children will imitate animals, there soon comes a time when they cease to do so and imitate only human beings: during childhood those who perform the more active occupations; during adolescent those who express what are to them the ideals of character. The little child rolls up a piece of paper, and imitates the action of his father when smoking a cigarette. But the growing boy smokes a real cigarette, so that he may feel himself a man. This expression of imagination is sometimes innocent and pleasant; but, where it is a copying of adult follies, an endeavor to enter adult experiences too soon, it gives us a race of blasé young-old persons who have no laid-up treasures. ITS EXPRESSION IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD