a lone country farm is made to understand how a girl in a city
sweating-den feels and lives; the London exquisite realises the life of a
Californian ranchman; royalty and tenement dwellers become acquainted,
through the power of the imagination working on experience shown in the
light of a human basis common to both. Fiction supplies an element of
culture,--that of the sympathies, which is invaluable. And the beginnings
of this culture, this widening and clearing of the avenues of human
sympathy, are especially easily made with children in the nature story.

When you begin, "There was once a little furry rabbit,"[1] the child's
curiosity is awakened by the very fact that the rabbit is not a child,
but something of a different species altogether. "Now for something new
and adventuresome," says his expectation, "we are starting off into a
foreign world." He listens wide-eyed, while you say, "and he lived in a
warm, cosy nest, down under the long grass with his mother"--how
delightful, to live in a place like that; so different from little boys'
homes!--"his name was Raggylug, and his mother's name was Molly
Cottontail. And every morning, when Molly Cottontail went out to get their
food, she said to Raggylug, 'Now, Raggylug, remember you are only a baby
rabbit, and don't move from the nest. No matter what you hear, no matter
what you see, don't you move!'"--all this is different still, yet it is
familiar, too; it appears that rabbits are rather like folks. So the tale
proceeds, and the little furry rabbit passes through experiences strange
to little boys, yet very like little boys' adventures in some respects; he
is frightened by a snake, comforted by his mammy, and taken to a new
house, under the long grass a long way off. These are all situations to
which the child has a key. There is just enough of strangeness to entice,
just enough of the familiar to relieve any strain. When the child has
lived through the day's happenings with Raggylug, the latter has begun to
seem veritably a little brother of the grass to him. And because he has