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I^jfl Tommy's Rocking-Horse M\%
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(Melies)
By GLADYS ROOSEVELT
A catalog from the Lilliputian Bazaar! Is there any household where the arrival of such a book does not create a stir in Nursery-land? Tops and tomahawks are left unheeded on the floor, dolls fall in attitudes of painful contortion, and our first impulse is to take the shortest route downstairs — namely, the banisters.
And most of us do, except in a few well-regulated families where we are early taught the uses and abuses of stairs and the value of controlling our impulses.
Then everybody tries to see the book at the same time, and everybody wants the same pictures, and poor Mother and Nurse have a sorry time trying to keep .peace in the family.
Finally, when the pages have been torn out and a division : f spoils made, there comes the momentous question of deciding which side of the page to use. Everybody offers advice and everybody has a different opinion, which is quite possible — in Nurseryland — despite the fact that there are only two sides to a page.
We wonder if Mr. Publisher knows what an incentive to the development of reason and judgment and argumentation his book affords. Perhaps that's why he never sends more than one copy to a family. Publishers always have such educational aims.
Sometimes it happens that you are the only inhabitant of Nursery-land, or that you just share it occasionally with big sister or brother — on Saturday mcrnings, for instance, or at twilight when the firelight pictures need your attention. Then you have to decide all by yourself which side of the page to cut out, and that 's much more difficult. To be sure, Nurse will give an opinion, and if she's at all observing it is almost sure to be the same as yours, but it doesn't help you at all
because Nurse doesn't want the picture, and you're never quite sure what you want until somebody else wants it too.
Now, if you are one of these sole inhabitants of Nursery-land, you can sympathize with Tommy, and if you are not, you'll be interested in him anyway, because of the toy catalog.
Way out on a Western ranch two curly heads were bending eagerly over a book, the long, dark brown curls of big sister Nellie mingling with Tommy's bobbing yellow ringlets. Utterly oblivious were they of sun or sound as page after page of dolls and soldiers, animals and express wagons met their fascinated gaze. Suddenly Tommy let forth a shriek of delight and pointed with one chubby finger to a picture of a rocking-horse, exclaiming :
"Tommy want horsie to ride. Tommy rather have horsie 'n all the bears and billy-goats they is. Sissie, oo get Tommy horsie, will oo?"
"Sissie," with the wisdom of years at her back, suggested that they ask Santa Claus to bring one at Christmas time, for she was unswerving in her devotion to the patron s#int of dolls and hobby-horses.
' ' U — m ! Big horsie vat Tommy can ride and put his armies 'round — see!" and he grabbed an imaginary horse with a great bear hug, at which even a paint-and-wood animal might have quailed.
"Sissie tell Tommy 'tory 'bout horsie," was the next demand, and Nellie proceeded to ride him up and down to the rhythm of
"Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross To see a fine lady on a white horse,"
while Tommy gleefully repeated the rhyme with her.
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