"You, too!" exclaimed the little girl's mother. "She evidently serenaded
the entire neighborhood! All day Saturday, her only holiday, she went
around, singing under various windows! I wonder what put the idea into
her head."

"Did you ask her?" I questioned, with much curiosity.

"Yes," answered the child's mother; "but she only smiled, and looked
embarrassed, so I said nothing further. She seemed to want to keep her
secret, the dear baby! So I thought I'd let her!"

And I--I, too, kept it. "Yes, do let her," was all I said.

American children, when "playing alone," impersonate the heroes and
heroines of the dramas they see, or the stories they are told, or the
books they read (how much more often they must do it than we suspect our
memories of our own childish days will teach us), but when they play
together, even when they "play at books that they have read," they
seldom "pretend." A group of small boys who have just read "Robin Hood"
do not say: "Wouldn't it be fun to play that _we_ are Robin Hood and his
Merry Men, and that our grove is Sherwood Forest?" They are more apt to
say: "It would be good sport for _us_--shooting with bows and arrows. We
might get some, and fix up a target somewhere and practise." The circle
of little girls who have read "Mary's Meadow" do not propose that they
play at being Mary. They decide instead upon doing, in their own proper
persons, what Mary did in hers. They can play together, the children of
our Nation, but they seem unable to "pretend" together. They are perhaps
too self-conscious.

It is a significant circumstance that yearly there are published in