"Ah!" says the friend, "this is surely meant for a lion?"

"No," says the artist (?), with some slight show of temper, "it is my
little lap-dog."

Another artifice which is particularly successful with very small
children is to insure their attention by inviting their cooperation
before one actually begins the story. The following has proved quite
effective as a short introduction to my stories when I was addressing
large audiences of children:

"Do you know that last night I had a very strange dream, which I am
going to tell you before I begin the stories? I dreamed that I was
walking along the streets of---[here would follow the town in which I
happened to be speaking], with a large bundle on my shoulders, and this
bundle was full of stories which I had been collecting all over the
world in different countries; and I was shouting at the top of my voice:
'Stories! Stories! Stories! Who will listen to my stories?' And the
children came flocking round me in my dream, saying: 'Tell _us_ your
stories. _We_ will listen to your stories.' So I pulled out a story
from my big bundle and I began in a most excited way, "Once upon a time
there lived a King and a Queen who had no children, and they---' Here
a little boy, _very_ much like that little boy I see sitting in the
front row, stopped me, saying: 'Oh, I know _that_ old story: it's
Sleeping Beauty.'

"So I pulled out a second story, and began: 'Once upon a time there
was a little girl who was sent by her mother to visit her grandmother
---' Then a little girl, _so_ much like the one sitting at the end of
the second row, said: 'Oh! everybody knows that story! It's---'"