[Illustration:  THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY.]

She must, moreover, not only originate, herself, modes of amusing the imagination of her children, but must fall in with and aid those which they originate.  If your little daughter is playing with her doll, look up from your work and say a few words to the doll or the child in a grave and serious manner, assuming that the doll is a living and sentient being.  If your boy is playing horses in the garden while you are there attending to your flowers, ask him with all gravity what he values his horse at, and whether he wishes to sell him.  Ask him whether he ever bites, or breaks out of his pasture; and give him some advice about not driving him too fast up hill, and not giving him oats when he is warm.  He will at once enter into such a conversation in the most serious manner, and the pleasure of his play will be greatly increased by your joining with him in maintaining the illusion.

There is a still more important advantage than the temporary increase to your children’s happiness by acting on this principle.  By thus joining with them, even for a few moments, in their play, you establish a closer bond of sympathy between your own heart and theirs, and attach them to you more strongly than you can do by any other means.  Indeed, in many cases the most important moral lessons can be conveyed in connection with these illusions of children, and in a way not only more agreeable but far more effective than by any other method.

Influence without Claim to Authority.

Acting through the imagination of children—­if the art of doing so is once understood—­will prove at once an invaluable and an inexhaustible resource for all those classes of persons who are placed in situations requiring them to exercise an influence over children without having any proper authority over them; such, for example, as uncles and aunts, older brothers and sisters, and even visitors residing more or less permanently in a family, and desirous, from a wish to do good, of promoting the welfare and the improvement of the younger members of it.  It often happens that such a visitor, without any actual right of authority, acquires a greater influence over the minds of the children than the parents themselves; and many a mother, who, with all her threatenings and scoldings, and even punishments, can not make herself obeyed, is surprised at the absolute ascendency which some inmate residing in the family acquires over them by means so silent, gentle, and unpretending, that they seem mysterious and almost magical.  “What is the secret of it?” asks the mother sometimes in such a case.  “You never punish the children, and you never scold them, and yet they obey you a great deal more readily and certainly than they do me.”

There are a great many different means which may be employed in combination with each other for acquiring this kind of ascendency, and among them the use which may be made of the power of the imagination in the young is one of the most important.