The Child at Play : Part 6

The American Child
by Elizabeth McCracken

(Page 8 of 13)

It is a noteworthy fact that hundreds of children in America send in contributions, month after month, year after year, to this magazine. Even more significant is it that they prepare these contributions with all the conscientious care of grown-up writers or painters to whom writing or painting is the chiefest reality of life. So whole-heartedly do the children play at being what their elders are!

An Italian woman once asked me, "The American children - what do they employ as toys?"

I could only reply, "Almost anything; almost everything!"

When we are furthest from seeing the toy possibilities of a thing, they see it. I have among my treasures a libation cup and a ushabti figurine - votive offerings from the Temple of Osiris, at Abydos.

A short time ago a little boy friend of mine lighted upon them in their safe retreat. "What are these?" he inquired.

"They came from Egypt - " I began.

"Oh, really and truly?" he cried. "Did they come from the Egypt in the poem -

"'Where among the desert sands Some deserted city stands, There I'll come when I'm a man With a camel caravan; And in a corner find the toys Of the old Egyptian boys'?"

He spent a happy hour playing with the libation cup and the ushabti - trophies of one of the most remarkable explorations of our era. I did not tell him what they were. He knew concerning them all he needed to know - that they could be "employed as toys." Perhaps the very tiniest of the "old Egyptian boys" had known only this, too.

"Little girls do not play with dolls in these days!" is a remark that has been made with great frequency of late years. Those of us who have many friends among little girls often wonder what is at the basis of this rumor. There have always been girls who did not care for dolls. In the old-fashioned story for girls there was invariably one such. In "Little Women," as we all recall, it was Jo. No doubt the persons who say that little girls no longer play with dolls count among their childish acquaintances a disproportionate number of Jos. Playing with dolls would seem to be too fundamentally little-girlish ever to fall into desuetude.

"Girls, as well as boys, play with dogs in these days!" is another plaintive cry we often hear. But were there ever days when this was not the case? From that far-off day when Iseult "had always a little brachet with her that Tristram gave her the first time that ever she came into Cornwell," to the time when Dora cuddled Jip, even down to our own day, when the heroine of "Queed" walks forth with her Behemoth, girls both in fact and in fiction have played with dogs; played with them no less than boys. This proclivity on the part of the little girls of our Nation is not distinctively American, nor especially childish, nor particularly girl-like; it is merely human.

In few activities do the children of our Nation reveal what we call the "American sense of humor" so clearly as in their play. Slight ills, and even serious misfortunes, they instinctively endeavor to lift and carry with a laugh. It would be difficult to surpass the gay heroism to which they sometimes attain.

Most of us remember the little hunchbacked boy in "Little Men" who, when the children played "menagerie," chose the part of the dromedary. "Because," he explained, "I have a hump on my back!"

Among my acquaintances there is a little girl who is blind. One day I invited her to go picnicking with a party of normal children, one of whom was her elder sister. She was accustomed to the company of children who could see, and she showed a ready disposition to join in the games of the other picnickers. Her sister stayed close beside her and guarded and guided her.

"Let's play blind man's buff," one of the children heedlessly suggested after a long course of "drop-the-handkerchief."

The other children with seeing eyes instantly looked at the child who was sightless, and whispered, "Ssh! You'll hurt her feelings!"

But the little blind girl scrambled eagerly to her feet. "Yes," she said, brightly; "let's play blind man's buff! I can be 'It' all the time!"

There is a phrase that has been very widely adopted by Americans. Scarcely one of us but uses it - "playing the game." Our highest commendation of a man or a woman has come to be, "He plays the game," or "She plays the game." Another phrase, often upon our lips, is "according to the rules of the game." We Americans talk of the most sacred things of life in the vocabulary of children at play. May not this be because the children of our Nation play so well; so much better than we grown- ups do anything?