Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/679

Rh children with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, the child's intercourse with his doll and his toy "gee gee" is on the whole a striking display of loving solicitude—a solicitude which is at once tender and corrective, and has the enduring constancy of a maternal instinct. No one can watch the care given to a doll, the wide-ranging efforts to provide for its comfort, keeping it Warm, feeding it, bathing it, tending it while sick and so forth, to make it look pretty, to make it behave nicely, approving, scolding, as occasion arises, and note the misery of the child when parted from it, without acknowledging that in this plaything humanized by childish fancy we have the very focus of the rays of childish tenderness; that in the child's devotion to its wooden pet we have a striking example of the truth that daily companionship and the habit of caring for a thing make it an inseparable part of us.

Lastly, the reader may be reminded that childish kindness and pitifulness extend to what look to us still less deserving objects in the inanimate world. The expression of pity for the falling leaves and for the stones condemned to lie always in one place, referred to above, shows how quick childish feeling is to detect what is sad in the look of things. Children have even been known to apply the commiserating vocable "poor" to a torn paper figure and to a bent pin. It seems right to suppose tha.t here too the tender heart of the child saw occasion for pity.

It is worth noting that childish sorrow at the sufferings of things is sometimes so keen that even artistic descriptions which contain a "cruel" element are shunned. A little boy under four "is indignant [writes his mother] at any picture where an animal suffers. He has even turned against several of his favorite pictures—German Bilderbogen—because they are 'cruel' as the bear led home with a corkscrew in his nose." The extreme manifestation of this shrinking from the representation of animal or human suffering is dislike for "sad stories." The unsophisticated tender heart of the child can find no pleasure in horrors which appear to be the crowning delight of many an adult reader.

Here, however, it is evident we verge on the confines of sentimental pity. It is worth remarking that it is the highly imaginative children who shed most tears over these fictitious sufferings. Children with more matter-of-fact minds and a practical turn are not so affected. Thus a mother writes of her two girls: "M, being the most imaginative, is and always has been much affected by sad stories, especially if read to her with dramatic inflections of voice. From two years old upward these have always affected her to tears, while P, who is really the most tender-hearted and helpful, but has little imagination, never cries at sad stories,