come and watch him do it. And mother liked it, and used to tell other
people about it. We don't run races now, because it might remind mother
too much."

No matter how joyously American children may play with their elders, or
with their contemporaries, whatever enhancement their satisfaction in
play with one another may gain from the presence of grown-up spectators,
they are not likely to become so dependent upon the one, nor so self-
conscious by reason of the other, that they will relinquish--or, worse
still, never know--the dear delights of "playing alone." Games played in
company may be the finest prose--they are yet prose; games played alone
are pure poetry. The children of our Nation are not without that
imagination which, on one day or another, impels a child to wander,
"lonely as a cloud," along the path of dreamful, solitary play.

How often a child who, to our eyes, appears to be doing nothing
whatever, is "playing alone" a delectable game! Probably, only once in a
hundred times, and then, by the merest accident, do we discover what
that game is.

Among my child friends there is a little boy who takes great pleasure in
seeing dramas acted. One spring day I took him to an open-air
presentation of "As You Like It."

The comedy was charmingly given in a clearing in a beautiful private
park. Orlando had "real" trees and hawthorns and brambles upon which to
hang his verses; and he made lavish use of them.

The fancy of my small friend was quite captivated by what he called
"playing hide-and-go-seek with poems." "What fun he has, watching her