From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
When our Chinese laundry man came in today he brought me a beautiful present. It is a big wooden egg, painted in all sorts of different beautiful bright colors and inside of it are a million little eggs. You keep opening the eggs ‘til you get to the tiniest one and that is so very tiny that you can hardly hold it in your hand. Aunt Tillie says that if I would stop biting my nails it would be easier to hold tiny things because I then could pick them up with my nails, like pincers.
I am delighted to learn new things from Hilda almost every day. Although I was familiar with Russian nesting dolls, such objects originated in China, as explained in a blog post on the history of nesting dolls.