Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

CHILD'S PLAY
tell myself a hunter's story, would have made it more
palatable than the best of sauces. To the grown
person, cold mutton is cold mutton all the world
over ; not all the mythology ever invented by man
will make it better or worse to him ; the broad fact,
the clamant reality, of '''the mutton carries away
before it such seductive figments. But for the child
it is still possible to weave an enchantment over
eatables ; and if he has but read of a dish in a story-
book, it will be heavenly manna to him for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and drinking
and exercise, if he is not something positive in his
tastes, it means he has a feeble body and should have
some medicine ; but children may be pure spirits, if
they will, and take their enjoyment in a world of
moonshine. Sensation does not count for so much
in our first years as afterwards ; something of the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us ; we
see and touch and hear through a sort of golden
mist. Children, for instance, are able enough to see,
but they have no great faculty for looking ; they do
not use their eyes for the pleasure of using them,
but for by-ends of their own ; and the things I call
to mind seeing most vividly were not beautiful in
themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to
me as I thought they might be turned to practical
account in play. Nor is the sense of touch so clean
and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you
will turn over your old memories, I think the sensa-
tions of this sort you remember will be somewhat
vague, and come to not much more than a blunt,
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