The third division of constructive fantasy, comprising exaggeration and depreciation, is also an object of playful activity. All children delight in giants and dwarfs, whether because they excite pleasurable emotions by their disproportionateness, which appeals to the comic sense, or whether it is the strong stimulus of what is unusual that accounts for the attraction. Marie G—— improvised a rare tale when she was five and a half years old, which well illustrates exaggeration, as well as conscious illusion and imaginative combination. The child was lying in bed in the early morning with a copy of Grimm’s tales, and pretended to be reading from it. “Once upon a time there was a king who had a little daughter. She lay in the cradle. He came in and knew it was his daughter, and they both had a wedding. As they sat at the table the king said, ‘Please draw me some beer in a big glass.’ Then they brought a glass that was thirty yards high, and went to sleep; only the king stayed up as a watchman. And if they are not dead they are living there yet.” Of course the child had no clear idea of how high this glass would be, but she evidently pictured one whose size far transcended the limits of reality—of this I subsequently satisfied myself. Adults are constantly using this sort of imaginative exercise in a playful way in verbal exaggeration. The talk of students and of girls abounds in superlatives, and they are employed by satirists with telling effect—so much so that the recounter himself is sometimes deceived by his own extravagance. Schneegans says in his interesting book: “The grotesque satirist is often carried away by his own work, and gradually loses sight of his original aim; ... and finally the conclusion is forced upon us that the writer has yielded to his passion for gross exaggeration.” This is certainly true of Rabelais, when he says that Pantagruel had but to put out his tongue to protect his whole army from the rain, or that his arrows were as large as the beams of the bridge at Nantes, and yet with one of them he could shoot an oyster from its shell without breaking the latter; or when he describes the people who needed no tailor, since one of their ears served as hose, doublet, and vest, while the other was used like a Spanish mantle. This last morsel recalls some of the folk tales which have amused the masses for more than two thousand years. While we may not lightly affirm that the grotesque extravagance of some of these stories is always due to imaginative play, yet we can trace it in such of them as the Greenland myth of little Kagsagsuk, whom the men lifted by the nostrils until they grew enormous, while the rest of his poorly fed body remained as small as ever, and in the account of his subsequent marvellous strength. Kagsagsuk divided the mob as though it had been made of little fishes, and ran so vigorously that his heels hit the back of his neck, and the snow flying up around him made shining rainbows.[306]