is the filter of personality. Everybody has something of the curiosity of
the primitive man concerning his neighbour; what another has in his own
person felt and done has an especial hold on each one of us. The most
cultured of audiences will listen to the personal reminiscences of an
explorer with a different tingle of interest from that which it feels for
a scientific lecture on the results of the exploration. The longing for
the personal in experience is a very human longing. And this instinct or
longing is especially strong in children. It finds expression in their
delight in tales of what father or mother did when they were little, of
what happened to grandmother when she went on a journey, and so on, but it
also extends to stories which are not in themselves personal: which take
their personal savour merely from the fact that they flow from the lips in
spontaneous, homely phrases, with an appreciative gusto which suggests
participation.

The greater ease in holding the attention of children is, for teachers, a
sufficient practical reason for telling stories rather than reading them.
It is incomparably easier to make the necessary exertion of "magnetism,"
or whatever it may be called, when nothing else distracts the attention.
One's eyes meet the children's gaze naturally and constantly; one's
expression responds to and initiates theirs without effort; the connection
is immediate. For the ease of the teacher, then, no less than for the joy
of the children, may the art of story-telling be urged as pre-eminent over
the art of reading.

It is a very old, a very beautiful art. Merely to think of it carries
one's imaginary vision to scenes of glorious and touching antiquity. The
tellers of the stories of which Homer's _Iliad_ was compounded; the
transmitters of the legend and history which make up the _Gesta
Romanorum_; the travelling raconteurs whose brief heroic tales are woven