knew_ in quite the same way as he did. His brothers and sisters played
up to a certain point, and then put the things aside as if they had only
been assumed for the time and were not real. To him they were always
real. His father's words, too, that evening had sorely puzzled him when
he came to think over them afterwards: "They're a baby's notions....
They're silly, silly, silly." Were these things real or were they not?
And, as he pondered, yearning dumbly, as only these little souls can
yearn, the wistfulness in his heart went out to meet the moonlight in
the air. Together they wove a spell that seemed to summon before him a
fairy of the night, who whispered an answer into his heart: "We are real
so long as you believe in us. It is your imagination that makes us real
and gives us life. Please, never, never stop believing."

Jimbo was not quite sure that he understood the message, but he liked it
all the same, and felt comforted. So long as they believed in one
another, the rest did not matter very much after all. And when at last,
shivering with cold, he crept back to bed, it was only to find through
the Gates of Sleep a more direct way to the things he had been thinking
about, and to wander for the rest of the night, unwatched and free,
through the wonders of an Enchanted Land.

Jimbo, as his father had said, was an imaginative child. Most children
are--more or less; and he was "more," at least, "more" than his brothers
and sisters. The Colonel thought he had made a penetrating discovery,
but his wife had known it always. His head, indeed, was "full of
things,"--things that, unless trained into a channel where they could be
controlled and properly schooled, would certainly interfere with his
success in a practical world, and be a source of mingled pain and joy to
him all through life. To have trained these forces, ever bursting out
towards creation, in his little soul,--to have explained, interpreted,
and dealt fairly by them, would perhaps have been the best and wisest
way; to have suppressed them altogether, cleaned them out by the process
of substitution, this might have succeeded too in less measure; but to
turn them into a veritable rout of horror by the common method of
"frightening the nonsense out of the boy," this was surely the very
worst way of dealing with such a case, and the most cruel. Yet, this was
the method adopted by the Colonel in the robust good-nature of his
heart, and the utter ignorance of his