"How can a lion come roaring at you, you silly thing? There's no lions
only in the shows."

"No, but if we were in the lion countries--I mean in Africa where it's
very hot, the lions eat people there. I can show it you in the book
where I read it."

"Well, I should get a gun and shoot him."

"But if you hadn't a gun?--we might have gone out, you know, not
thinking, just as we go out fishing, and then a great lion might come
towards us roaring, and we could not get away from him. What should
you do, Tom?"

Tom paused, and at last turned away contemptuously, saying: "But the
lion _isn't_ coming. What's the use of talking?"

This passage illustrates also the difference between the highly-
developed imagination of the one and the stodgy prosaical temperament
of the other. Tom could enter into the elementary question of giving
his schoolfellow a black eye, but could not possibly enter into the
drama of the imaginary arrival of a lion. He was sorely in need of
fairy stories.

It is to this element we have to cater, and we cannot shirk our
responsibilities.

William James says:

"Living things, moving things or things that savor of danger or blood,