He is interested in inanimate things, especially in using them, and so he plays with his toys.  He builds bricks, runs engines, solves simple puzzle pictures, asks to work with his father’s gardening tools, or his mother’s cooking utensils.  He is interested in the life of the garden, in the growing things, in the snail or spider he finds, in the cat, dog or rabbit of the family; he wants to dig, water and feed these various things, but he declines regular responsibility; his interest is in spurts.

He is interested in sounds, both in those he can produce and in those produced by others:  soon he is interested in music, he will listen to it for considerable periods, and may join in it:  at first more especially on the rhythmical side.  So, too, he likes the rhythm of poetry and the melody sounds of words.  He is interested in making things; on a wet day he will ask for scissors and paste, or bring out his paint box or chalks; on a fine day he mixes sand or mud with water, or builds a shelter with poles and shawls; at any time when he has an opportunity he shuts himself into the bathroom and experiments with the taps, sails boats, colours water, blows bubbles, tries to mix things, wet and dry.

He is interested in the doings of other people, in their conduct and in his own; he is more interested in their badness than in their goodness:  “Tell me more of the bad things your children do,” said a little boy to his teacher aunt, and the request is significant and general; we learn so little by mere uncontrasted goodness.  He is interested in the words that clothe narrations and in their style, he is impatient of a change in form of an accepted piece of prose or poetry.  He is hungry for the sounds of telling words and phrases.

He is interested in reproducing the doings of other people so that he may experience them more fully, and this involves minute observation, careful and intelligent imitation, and vivid imagination.  His own word for it is pretence.

There are other things that he grasps at more vaguely and later; he is dimly aware that people have lived before, and he is less dimly aware that people live in places different from his own surroundings.  He realises that some of the stories, such as the fairy stories, are true in one sense, a sense that responds to something within himself; that some are true in another more material, and external sense, one concerned with things that really happen.  He hears of “black men,” and of “ships that carry people across the sea,” and of “things that come back in those ships.”

He is interested in the immaterial world suggested by the mysteries of woods and gardens, he has a dim conception that there is some life beyond the visible, he feels a power behind life and he reveals this in his early questions.  He is keenly interested in questions of birth and death, and sometimes comes into close contact with them.  He feels that other wonders must be accounted for—­the snow, thunder and lightning, the colours of summer, the changeful sea.  At first the world of fairy lore may satisfy him, later comes the life of the undying spirit, but the two are continuous.  He may attend “religious observances,” and these may help or they may hinder.