sed them to grow upon the trees.

Another child of my acquaintance, a little girl, I discovered in an even
sweeter game for "playing alone." She chanced to call upon me one
afternoon just as I was taking from its wrappings an _edition de luxe_
of "Pippa Passes." Her joy in the exquisite illustrations with which the
book was embellished even exceeded mine.

"Is the story in the book as lovely as the pictures?" she queried.

"Yes," I assured her.

Then, at her urgent request, I told her the tale of the "little black-
eyed pretty singing Felippa"; of her "single day," and of her singing
that "righted all again" on that holiday in Asolo.

The child was silent for a moment after I had finished the story. "Do
you like it?" I inquired.

"Um--yes," she mused. "Let me look at the pictures some more," she
asked, with sudden eagerness.

I handed her the book, and she pored over it for a long time. "The
houses then were not like the houses now--were they?" she said; "and the
people dressed in funny clothes."

The next Saturday, at an early hour, I heard beneath my window a
childish voice singing a kindergarten song. I peeped out. There stood my
little friend. I was careful to make no sound and to keep well in the
shadow. The small girl finished her song, and softly ran away.

"Your little girl serenaded me the other morning," I said to her mother
when I saw her a few days afterward. The child had shown so slight an
interest in anything in my book except the pictures that I did not yet
connect her singing with it.

"You, too!" exclaimed the little girl's mother. "She evidently serenaded
the entire neighborhood! All day Saturday, her only holiday, she went
around, singing under various windows! I wonder what put the idea into
her head."

"Did you ask her?" I questioned, with much curiosity.

"Yes," answered the child's mother; "but she only smiled, and looked
embarrassed, so I said nothing further. She seemed to want to keep her
secret, the dear baby! So I thought I'd let her!"

And I--I, too, kept it. "Yes, do let her," was all I said.

American children, when "playing alone," impersonate the heroes and
heroines of the dramas they see, or the stories they are told, or the
books they read (how much more often they must do it than we suspect our
memories of our own childish days will teach us), but when they play
together, even when they "play at books that they have read," they
seldom "pretend." A group of small boys