confronted with the concrete problem of what desideratum by which tale,
and how, the average teacher sometimes finds her cheerfulness displaced by
a sense of inadequacy to the situation.

People who have always told stories to children, who do not know when they
began or how they do it; whose heads are stocked with the accretions of
years of fairyland-dwelling and nonsense-sharing,--these cannot understand
the perplexity of one to whom the gift and the opportunity have not "come
natural." But there are many who can understand it, personally and all
too well. To these, the teachers who have not a knack for story-telling,
who feel as shy as their own youngest scholar at the thought of it, who do
not know where the good stories are, or which ones are easy to tell, it is
my earnest hope that the following pages will bring something definite and
practical in the way of suggestion and reference.




HOW TO TELL STORIES TO CHILDREN




CHAPTER I

THE PURPOSE OF STORY-TELLING IN SCHOOL


Let us first consider together the primary matter of the _aim_ in
educational story-telling. On our conception of this must depend very