ncrease to his repertoire which will come to him by
listening, by browsing in chance volumes and magazines, and even
newspapers, by observing everyday life, and in all remembering his own
youth, and his youthful, waiting audience.

And that youthful audience? A rather too common mistake is made in
allowing overmuch for the creative imagination of the normal child. It is
not creative imagination which the normal child possesses so much as an
enormous credulity and no limitations. If we consider for a moment we see
that there has been little or nothing to limit things for him, therefore
anything is possible. It is the years of our life as they come which
narrow our fancies and set a bound to our beliefs; for experience has
taught us that for the most part a certain cause will produce a certain
effect. The child, on the contrary, has but little knowledge of causes,
and as yet but an imperfect realisation of effects. If we, for instance,
go into the midst of a savage country, we know that there is the chance of
our meeting a savage. But to the young child it is quite as possible to
meet a Red Indian coming round the bend of the brook at the bottom of the
orchard, as it is to meet him in his own wigwam.

The child is an adept at make-believe, but his make-believes are, as a
rule, practical and serious. It is credulity rather than imagination which
helps him. He takes the tales he has been _told_, the facts he has
observed, and for the most part reproduces them to the best of his
ability. And "nothing," as Stevenson says, "can stagger a child's faith;
he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle is taken
away for the accommodation of a morning visitor and he is nothing abashed;
he can skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst
of the enchanted pleasuance he can see, without sensible shock, the
gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner."

The child, in fact, is neither undeveloped "grown-up" nor unspoiled angel.
Perhaps he has a dash of both, but most of all he is akin to the grown
person who dreams. With the dreamer and with the child there is that
unquestioning acceptance of circumstances as they arise, however unusual
and disconcerting they may be. In dreams the wildest, most improbable and
fantastic things happen, but they are not so to the dreamer. The veriest
cynic amongst us must take his dreams