There were beautiful shops and there were flowers. Anna [her doll] wanted to pick one, and a bear came up. All my six children were dreadfully scared and hid in the bathroom stove, and I locked the door and took out the key, and the bear went away; and I was so frightened!” It was evidently her intention to make a connected story, although the first situation, the scene down town, was transferred to a different one without any proper transition. Yet the various processes are easily traced in spite of their complexity. First, the idea of the city where the romancer takes her doll, as she was often taken by her mother. The memory picture of the florists’ shops which led to an overweening desire on the part of the doll to take a flower. Then judicial wrath appears in the frightful shape of the bear, and at once the whole situation is changed; there are now the six children of the familiar tale, who hide. But where? In our bathroom stove (an improvement on the tale), which develops a lock and key for the occasion (confusion with the attributes of a closet door). Here, then, are divisions 1 and 2 clearly defined—namely, the combining of complex presentations, and the detachment and transposition of some features. Analogy with artistic methods is too obvious to need enlarging upon.[302] An interesting example of the inventiveness of an older child endowed with genius is the voluminous romance which the young Goethe used to tell again and again to his playmates, and has transcribed in his biography. It will be seen that the imaginative process is much less easily traced in it than in the earlier instance.[303] One important branch of imaginative composition is the picturing of the fantastic creatures of mythology, such as animals with human heads, mermaids, and the grotesque blending of animal and vegetable life, yet with the essential features taken from Nature. As Dickens says of his characters, that, being made up of many people, they were composite,[304] so with these creations. The following dialogue of Marie G—— with her doll near the end of her fifth year will illustrate the use of this faculty in the case of concepts which transcend the limits of actuality. “So, little sister Olga, you have come in from your walk. Tell me about everything that you saw. A little lamb, a cow, a dog, a horse. Yes, and what else? Blue bells and green primroses and red leaves—but that can not be; you are fibbing, my little sister.” Such playful and grotesque combinations are often introduced in art, but they no longer appeal to superstitious fear. In the temptations of St. Anthony, in Oriental tales of strangely deformed men, in the taste for grotesque gargoyles and other ornaments, we find instances. In some fantastic creations the imagination is given unbridled license, with the result that the production acquires more of the characteristics of play.[305]