slowly, with bated breath, savoring the interest. Believe me, I had
little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste
when I tool cream with it, I used often to go without because the
cream dimmed the transparent fractures."

In his work on "Imagination," Ribot says: "The free initiative of
children is always superior to the imitations we pretend to make
for them."

The passage from Robert Louis Stevenson becomes more clear from a
scientific point of view when taken in connection with one from Karl
Groos' book on the "Psychology of Animal Play":

"The child is wholly absorbed in his play, and yet under the ebb and
flow of thought and feeling like still water under wind-swept waves,
he has the knowledge that it is pretense after all. Behind the sham
'I' that takes part in the game, stands the unchanged 'I' which
regards the sham 'I' with quiet superiority."

Queyrat speaks of play as one of the distinct phases of a child's
imagination; it is "essentially a metamorphosis of reality, a
transformation of places and things."

Now to return to the point which Mrs. Ewing makes, namely, that we
should develop in normal children the power of distinguishing between
truth and falsehood.

I should suggest including two or three stories which would test that
power in children, and if they fail to realize the difference between
romancing and telling lies, then it is evident that they need special