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PLAYING IN THE SAND
S
AND is the only indestructible toy there is. You cannot break it, wear it out, spoil it or even lose it. It is almost impossible to steal it. If it gets sunlight now and then it is perfectly sanitary.
It is particularly agreeable to children's use because they can play with it with their legs crossed. Those chair-inhabiting animals, the adults, do not realize how uncomfortable it is to a child to use his legs as the hanging fringe to a chair. Tailors and Turks are the only folks who sit as mankind was intended to sit.
Grown folks are mistaken when they say that the reason children love to play in the sand is because "they like dirt." While they have no special antipathy to dirt when it gathers naturally, it is not the dirtiness of sand that they like but the fact that it is something they can work with. As Joseph Lee says, prettily: "The hands are the heart's live wire." So the child rejoices in a substance so light, so plastic, and so "open-minded."
The first use of sand that seems to delight a baby, after he learns not to put it into his mouth, is to hide in it. The mystery of being unable to see his buried hand or leg gives him an unexplained delight. The hand is perhaps a hibernating rabbit, the fingers the tiny bunnies. To put sand in bags or bottles is a similar pleasure, the sense of controlling it being an added accomplishment.
Why a child will continue to fill and empty a pail or an old tomato can with sand for an entire morning with placid joy is something no adult has been able to fathom. It seems to be restful to the nerves, but he doesn't get ahead any. Infants are not anxious to "get ahead."
When the small boy comes to the stage where he only empties the sand on his hair or throws it at passers-by he
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