Johnny was playing in the room while his mother was sewing at the window. Johnny looked out of the window and exclaimed, "Oh, mother, see that great big lion!"

His mother looked, but saw only a medium-sized dog.

"Why, Johnny," replied the mother, "how can you say such a thing? You know very well that was only a dog. Now go right in the corner and pray to God to forgive you for telling such a lie!"

Johnny went. When he came back, he said triumphantly, "See, mother,
God said He thought it was a lion Himself."

This poor mother is a typical example of a large class of mothers who fail to understand their children because they have no idea of what goes on in the child's mind. To Johnny the lion was just as real as the dog was to the mother. And even if the dog had not been there for the mother to see, Johnny could have seen just as real a lion.

Every mother ought to know that practically every healthy child has imagination. You will have to take a long day's journey to find a child that has no imagination to begin with—and then you will find that this child is wonderfully uninteresting, or actually stupid.

You can easily observe for yourself that as soon as a child knows a large number of objects and persons and names he will begin to rearrange his bits of knowledge into new combinations, and in this way make a little world of his own. In this world, beasts and furniture and flowers talk and have adventures. When the dew is on the grass, "the grass is crying." Butterflies are "flying pansies." Lightning is the "sky winking," and so on. This activity of the child's mind begins at about two years, and reaches its height between the ages of four and six. But it continues through life with greater or less intensity, according to circumstances and original disposition.

It is not only the poet and artist who need imagination, but all of us in our everyday concerns. Do you realize that the person to whom you like so much to talk about your affairs, because she is so sympathetic, is sympathetic because she has imagination? For without imagination we cannot "put ourselves in the place of another," and much of the misery in the relation between human beings exists because so many of us are unable to do this. The happy cannot realize the needs of the miserable, and the miserable cannot understand why anyone should be happy—if they lack imagination.

The need for imagination, far from being confined to dreamers and persons who dwell in the clouds, is of great practical importance in the development of mind and character. Imagination is a direct help in learning, and in developing sympathy. As one of our great moral leaders, Felix Adler, has said, much of the selfishness of the world is due, not to actual hard-heartedness, but to lack of imaginative power.

We all know the classic example of Queen Marie Antoinette, who, when told that the people were rioting for want of bread, exclaimed, "Why, let them eat cake instead!" Brought up in luxury, she could not realize what absolute want means. She had no imagination.

The world has progressed, but we still have among us the same type of unfortunate persons who are unable to put themselves in the place of others. I recently heard of a woman who, on being told of a family so poor that they had had nothing but cold potatoes for supper the night before, replied:

"They may be poor, but the mother must be a very bad housekeeper, anyway. For, even if they had nothing but potatoes to eat, she might at least have fried them."

Like her royal prototype, this modern woman had not the imagination to realize that a family could be so poor as to be in want of fuel.

But being able to put yourself in the place of another is of importance not only from the strictly moral point of view. You can easily see how it will affect one's everyday relations, how it will be of great help in avoiding misunderstandings of all kinds—as between mother and child, between mistress and maid, etc.

If parents would only realize this importance of imagination, and not look upon it as a "vain thing," they would not merely allow the child's imagination to take its own course; they would actually make efforts to cultivate and encourage it. In this way they would not only aid the child in becoming a better and more sympathetic man or woman, but would also add much to the happiness of the child.

Unless we have given special thought to this matter, most of us grown-ups do not appreciate how very real the child's world of make-believe is to him, and how essential to his happiness that we do not break into it rudely. When one of my boys was two and a half years old he was one day playing with an imaginary baby sister. A member of the household came into the room, whereupon he immediately broke out in wild screaming and became very much agitated. It took some time to quiet him and to find out that the cause of all his trouble was the fact that this person had inadvertently stepped upon his imaginary sister, whom he had placed upon the floor. Before him he saw his little sister crushed, and great were his horror and grief.

I know from this experience and many others that if we do not enter into the child's world and try to understand the working of his mind we will often find him naughty, when he is not naughty at all. In the example given it would have been very easy to follow the first impulse to reprove the child for what seemed very unreasonable conduct on his part. And such cases arise constantly.

How completely the child throws himself into an imaginary character is shown by an incident which occurred recently. A little boy of four, who had been accustomed to speak only German at home, was playing "doctor," and was so absorbed in the play that when dinner-time came he was loath to abandon the role. His mother, to avoid delay, simply said, "I think we will invite the doctor to have dinner with us," and he promptly accepted the invitation. When the maid came in, he said in English, "What is her name?"

"Marie," the mother replied. "Isn't that Mary in English?" the child politely inquired. "You see, I cannot speak German, for my mother never taught me." And although this little boy never spoke English to his parents nor his parents to him, as "doctor" he spoke English throughout the meal.

Many parents enter spontaneously into the spirit of their children's games, and make believe with the best of them. They pity poor Johnny when he screams with terror at the attack of the make-believe bear, and take great joy in admiring the make-believe kitten. If we but realized how all this make believe helps in the development of character and in the gaining of knowledge, all parents would try to develop the child's imagination, and not only those who have the gift intuitively. It is the child's natural way of learning things, of getting acquainted with all living and inanimate objects in his environment. It sharpens his observation. A child who tries to "act a horse," for example, will be much more apt to notice all the different activities and habits of the horse in his various relations than a child who merely observes passively.

A child with imagination, when receiving directions or instructions, can picture to himself what he is expected to do, and easily translates his instructions into action. To the unimaginative child the directions given will be so many words, and he cannot carry out these instructions as effectively.

Again and again teachers find that pupils fail to carry out orders, though able, when asked, to repeat word for word the instructions given them.

The plaintive inquiry, "What shall I do now?" is much more frequently heard from the child who is unimaginative or who has had the play of his imagination curbed. For the child can be whatever he wishes, and have whatever he likes, his heart's desire is at his finger's end, once his imagination is free. The rocking-chair can be a great big ship, the carpet a rolling sea, and at most a suggestion is needed from the busy mother. A few chairs can be a train of cars and keep him occupied for hours. A wooden box is transformed into a mighty locomotive—in fact, give an imaginative child almost anything, a string of beads, or a piece of colored glass, and out of it his imagination will construct great happiness.

A normal child does not need elaborate toys. The only function of a toy, as someone has well said, is "to serve as lay figures upon which the child's imagination can weave and drape its fancy."

Although parents have not always understood what goes on in the child's mind when he is so busy with his play, our poets and lovers of children have had a deeper insight. Stevenson, in his poem "My Kingdom," shows us how, with the touch of imagination, the child transforms the commonplace objects of his surroundings into material for rich romance:

Down by a shining water well
I found a very little dell,
No higher than my head.
The heather and the gorse about
In summer bloom were coming out,
Some yellow and some red.

I called the little pool a sea:
The little hills were big to me;
For I am very small.
I made boat, I made a town,
I searched the caverns up and down,
And named them one and all.

And all about was mine, I said,
The little sparrows overhead,
The little minnows, too.
This was the world and I was king:
For me the bees came by to sing,
For me the swallows flew.

I played there were no deeper seas,
Nor any wilder plains than these,
Nor other kings than me.
At last I hear my mother call
Out from the house at evenfall,
To call me home to tea.

And I must rise and leave my dell,
And leave my dimpled water well,
And leave my heather blooms.
Alas! and as my home I neared,
How very big my nurse appeared,
How great and cool the rooms!

Some children do not even need objects as a starting point for their imaginative activity. They can just conjure up persons and things to serve as material for their play. Many children, when alone, have imaginary companions. One little boy, when taken out for his airing, daily met an imaginary friend, whom he called "Buster." As soon as he stepped out of the house he uttered a peculiar call, to which Buster replied—though no one but he heard him—and he would run to meet him and they would have a lovely time together, sometimes for hours at a stretch.

Another little child received a daily visit from an imaginary cow. There was a certain place in the living-room where this red cow with white spots would appear. The child would go through the motions of feeding her, patting her, and bringing her water.

In these two cases the "companionship" lasted but a few months, but there are children whose imaginary companions grow up with them and get older as they get older.

[Illustration: Imagination supplies this two-year-old a prancing steed.]

In some instances there is a group of such imaginary companions, and their activities constitute "a continued story," of which the child is a living centre, although not necessarily the hero.

It seems to me that the power to create his own friends must be a great boon to a child who is forced to be alone a great deal or has no congenial companions.

There need be no fear—except perhaps in very extreme cases—that such activity of the imagination is morbid. A little girl who plays with her dolls is really doing the same thing, only that she has a symbol for each of her imaginary companions.

But although an imaginative child is much easier to teach later on, and although he does not trouble you with the incessant nagging "What shall I do now?" the mother whose idea of good conduct is "keeping quiet" will find the unimaginative child much easier to care for. He is very much less active and therefore "less troublesome." This explains why this priceless gift of imagination has so often been discouraged by parents and teachers. But they did not know that they were actually harming the child by so discouraging him, or, let us hope, they would not have chosen the easier way. For, after all, we are not looking for the easiest way of getting along with children, but for the best, and the best for them will prove in the end to be the best for us.

It must certainly try your patience, when you are tired, at the end of a day's work, to have Harry refuse to come to be put to bed because you called him "Harry"; and he replies, perhaps somewhat crossly: "I am not Harry, I told you. I am little Jack Horner, and I have to sit in my corner." But no matter how hard it may seem, do not get discouraged. Once you are fully aware of the importance of what seems to be but silly play, you will add this one more to your many sacrifices, and find that it will bring returns a hundredfold. And, after all, as in so many other problems, when you resolve to make the sacrifice, it turns out to be no sacrifice. For, once you approach the problem in an understanding spirit, the flights of the child's imagination will give you untold pleasure.

Another reason why imagination has been suppressed by those who are in charge of children is the fear that it will lead to the formation of habits of untruthfulness. It is very hard to realize, unless you understand the child's nature, that the child is not lying when he says something that is manifestly not so to you and the other adults. I have heard children reproved for lying when I was sure that they had no idea of what a "lie" is. In one family an older boy broke a plate and, when charged with the deed, denied it flatly. His little brother, however, confessed and described just how he had broken it. Now, the older boy was telling a falsehood consciously— probably from fear of punishment. The little fellow, however, was not telling an untruth—from his point of view. He really imagined having broken that plate. He had heard the event discussed by the family until all the incidents were vivid to him and he pictured himself as the hero.

Up to a certain time it is impossible for the child to distinguish between what we call real and his make-believe. Both are equally real to him, and the make-believe is ever so much more interesting.

Until about the fifth year a child does not know that he is imagining; between the ages of four and six the imaginative period is at its height, and there begins to appear a sort of undercurrent of consciousness that it is all make-believe, and this heightens the pleasure of trying to make it seem real. Gradually the child learns to distinguish between imaginary experiences and real ones, but until you are quite certain that he does distinguish, do not attach any moral significance to his stories. Should an older child be inclined to tell falsehoods, you may be sure that this is not because his imagination has been cultivated. There are then other reasons and causes, and they must be studied on their own account.

After you come to a clear appreciation of the value of imagination in the child's development you will, instead of suppressing his feelings, look around for ways of encouraging this activity of his mind. You will see a new value in fairy tales and fables and a new significance in every turn of his fancy.