ch akin that they
are easily transformed and exchange costumes without changing character;
while the legend, which belongs to a later period, often reflects the
large meaning of the myth and the free fancy of the fairy tale.

As a class, children not only possess the faculty of imagination, but
are very largely occupied with it during the most sensitive and
formative years, and those who lack it are brought under its spell by
their fellows. They do not accurately distinguish between the actual and
the imaginary, and they live at ease in a world out of which paths run
in every direction into wonderland. They begin their education when they
begin to play; for play not only affords an outlet for their energy, and
so supplies one great means of growth and training, but places them in
social relations with their mates and in conscious contact with the
world about them. The old games that have been played by generations of
children not only precede the training of the school and supplement it,
but accomplish some results in the nature of the child which are beyond
the reach of the school. When a crowd of boys are rushing across country
in "hounds and deer," they are giving lungs, heart and muscles the best
possible exercise; they are sharing certain rules of honor with one
another, expressed in that significant phrase, "fair play"; and they are
giving rein to their imaginations in the very name of their occupation.
Body, spirit and imagination have their part in every good game; for the
interest of a game lies in its appeal to the imagination, as in "hounds
and deer," or in its stimulus to activity, as in "tag" and
"hide-and-seek."

There are few chapters in the biography of the childhood of men of
genius more significant than those which describe imaginary worlds which
were, for a time, as real as the actual world in which the boy lived.
Goethe entertained and mystified his playmates with accounts of a
certain garden in which he wandered at will, but which they could not
find; and De Quincey created a kingdom, with all its complex relations
and varied activities, which he ruled with beneficence and affection
until, in an unlucky hour, he revealed his secret to his brother, who
straightway usurped his authority, and governed his subjects with such
tyranny and cruelty that De Quincey was compelled to save his people by
destroying them.

These elaborate and highly organized efforts of the young imagination,
of which boys and