Quintillian that I am justified in offering it to all those who wish
to realize what can be done by a gesture:

"As to the hands, without the aid of which all delivery would be
deficient and weak, it can scarcely be told of what a variety of
motions they are susceptible, since they almost equal in expression
the power of language itself. For other parts of the body assist the
speaker, but these, I may almost say, speak themselves. With our
hands we ask, promise, call persons to us and send them away,
threaten, supplicate, intimate dislike or fear; with out hands we
signify joy, grief, doubt, acknowledgement, penitence, and indicate
measure, quantity, number and time. Have not our hands the power of
inciting, of restraining, or beseeching, of testifying approbation?
. . . So that amidst the great diversity of tongues pervading all
nations and people, the language of the hands appears to be a language
common to all men."[14]

One of the most effective of artifices in telling stories to young
children is the use of mimicry--the imitation of animals' voices and
sound in general is of never-ending joy to the listeners. However,
I should wish to introduce a note of grave warning in connection with
this subject. This special artifice can only be used by such narrators
as have special aptitude and gifts in this direction. There are many
people with good imaginative power but who are wholly lacking in
the power of mimicry, and their efforts in this direction, however
painstaking, remain grotesque and therefore ineffective. When listening
to such performances, of which children are strangely critical, one is
reminded of the French story in which the amateur animal painter is
showing her picture to an undiscriminating friend: