little mouse, with injy-rubber wings and shoe-string tail, and bites
like the devil." There was an eye worth having! Agassiz himself could
not have hit off better the salient characteristics of the little
creature in question. Had that remarkable boy been brought into
contact, for five minutes only, with Julius Caesar, who can doubt that
the telling description he would have given of him would have come
down through all the ages?

I do not mean to urge the adoption of any ultra-utilitarian standpoint
in regard to playthings, or advise you rudely to enter the realm of
early infancy and interfere with the baby's legitimate desires by any
meddlesome pedagogic reasoning. Choose his toys wisely and then leave
him alone with them. Leave him to the throng of emotional impressions
they will call into being. Remember that they speak to his feelings
when his mind is not yet open to reason. The toy at this period is
surrounded with a halo of poetry and mystery, and lays hold of the
imagination and the heart without awaking vulgar curiosity. Thrice
happy age when one can hug one's white woolly lamb to one's bibbed
breast, kiss its pink bead eyes in irrational ecstasy, and manipulate
the squeak in its foreground without desire to explore the cause
thereof!

At this period the well-beloved toy, the dumb sharer of the child's
joys and sorrows, becomes the nucleus of a thousand enterprises, each
rendered more fascinating by its presence and sympathy. If the toy be
a horse, they take imaginary journeys together, and the road is doubly
delightful because never traveled alone. If it be a house, the child
lives therein a different life for every day in the week; for
no monarch alive is so all-powerful as he whose throne is the
imagination. Little tin soldier, Shem, Ham, and Japhet from the Noah's