Two little girls were at a party and the older one found occasion to
slap her sister's hand. The hostess reproved her for this, whereupon
the little girl asked, "Isn't she my own sister?" The hostess had to
admit that she was. "Well, I heard papa say that he can do what he
likes with his own."

Doing what we like with our own meant to the child exactly what the
words said, without those qualifications which we naturally put in
because of our greater experience.

Children learn with wonder that mother was once a baby, and that
father was once a baby, and so on. Dr. Sully tells of the little
girl who asked her mother, "When everybody was a baby, then who
could be the nurse if they were all babies?" Thus shows real
reasoning power; it was not the child's fault that she had no
historical perspective, and so could not see the babyhoods of
different people in their proper relations in time.

A little boy who was beginning to read deciphered a sign in a
grocery store, "Families supplied." He asked his mother whether they
could not get a new baby there.

When Herbert was passing through the scissors stage he cut a hole in
his father's coat. The father scolded him for spoiling his suit;
Herbert calmly replied, "I did not cut your suit; I only cut the
coat." He resented this accusation, which in his mind was not merely
an exaggeration, but entirely false, since a suit is a suit and a
coat is a coat.