Page:Roads to Childhood (1920).pdf/135

I did not care to be read to, except by my father, who read just as he talked and seemed to like the same books and pictures I did. The Nursery was his favorite magazine, I firmly believed not because he said it was, but because he seemed so interested in it. I associate with his reading the most beautiful parts of the Bible, Æsop’s “Fables” interspersed with proverbs, nonsense verses, old songs and hymns, a great deal of poetry, stories out of the lives of great men, and many stories of child life. He had a keen sense of dramatic values, a power of mimicry of animals and human beings, a strong sense of humor, and an intimate knowledge of men in their various forms of social and political organization. Moreover, he possessed the rare faculty of complete identification with the emotional life of childhood in all its stages of growth and change, and the imagination to know when to create a diversion. Since my intuitions have been at all times keener than my powers of external observation, I identified myself in turn with the childhood of my father. I seemed