Little Tuk
Now there was little Tuk. As a matter of fact his name was not Tuk at all, but before he could speak properly he called himself Tuk. He meant it for Carl, so it is just as well we should know that. He had to look after his sister Gustave who was much smaller than he was, and then he had his lessons to do, but these two things were rather difficult to manage at the same time.
The poor little boy sat with his little sister in his lap, at the same time looking at his open geography book which he held in front of him. Before school time the next morning he had to know the names of all the towns by heart and everything there was to know about them.
At last his mother came home, for she had been out, and she took little Gustave. Tuk ran to the window and read as hard as he could, for it was growing dark fast, and his mother could not afford to buy candles.
“There’s the old washerwoman from the lane,” his mother said as she looked out of the window. “She can hardly carry herself, and yet she has to carry the pail from the pump. Run down, little Tuk, and be a dear boy. Help the old woman!”
Tuk jumped up at once and ran to help her, but when he got home again it was quite dark and it was useless to talk about candles. He had to go to bed. He had an old turn-up bed, and he lay in it, thinking about his geography lesson, the Island of Zealand, and all his teacher had told him about it. He ought to have been learning the lesson, but of course, he could not do that now. He put the geography book under his pillow and he lay there thinking, and thinking—and then all at once it seemed just as if some one had kissed him on his eyes and nose and mouth, and he fell asleep.
Yet he was not quite asleep either. It seemed to him as if the old washerwoman were looking at him with her kind eyes and saying,
“It would be a great shame if you were not to know your lesson. You helped me, and now I will help you.”
And all at once the book under his head went “cribble, crabble.”
“Cluck, cluck, cluck!” There stood a hen from the town of Kiöge.
“I am a Kiöge hen,” it said, and then it went on to tell him how many inhabitants there were, and about the battle which had taken place there.
“Cribble, crabble, bang!” something plumped down; it was a wooden bird, the popinjay from Præstö. It told him that there were just as many inhabitants in Præstö as it had nails in its body, and it was very proud of this.
Now little Tuk no longer lay in bed. Gallop-a-gallop he went. He was sitting in front of a splendidly dressed knight with a shining helmet and a waving plume. They rode through the woods to the old town of Vordingborg, a very large and prosperous town. The castle towered above the royal city, and lights shone through the windows. There were songs and dancing within and the king was leading out the stately young court ladies to the dance. Morning came, and as the sun rose, the town sank away and the king’s palace, one tower after the other. At last only a single tower remained on the hill where the castle had stood, and the town had become tiny and very poor. The schoolboys came along with their books under their arms, and they said, “two thousand inhabitants,” but that was not true. There were not so many.
Little Tuk was still lying in his bed. First he thought he was dreaming, and then he thought he was not dreaming, but there was somebody close to him.
It was a sailor, a tiny little fellow, who might have been a cadet, and he said, “Little Tuk! Little Tuk! I greet you warmly from Korsöer which is a rising town. It is a flourishing town with steamers and coaches. It lies close to the sea and it has good high roads and pleasure gardens. It wanted to send a ship round the world but it did not do it, although it might have. And there is the most delicious scent about the town because there are beautiful rose gardens close by the gates.”
Little Tuk saw them, the green and red flowering branches, and then they vanished before his eyes and changed into wooded heights sloping down to the clear waters of the fjord. A stately old church towered over the fjord with its twin spires. Springs of water rushed down in bubbling streams, close by them sat an old king with a golden crown round his flowing locks. It was King Kroar of the Springs, and little Tuk was in Rœskilde. Down over the slopes and past the springs walked hand in hand all Denmark’s kings and queens wearing their crowns. On and on they went into the old church in time to the pealing of the bells and the rippling of the springs.
All at once everything vanished—where were they? Now an old peasant woman stood before little Tuk. She was a weeding woman and came from Sorö where the grass grows in the market place. She had put her gray linen apron over her head and shoulders. It was soaking wet; there must have been rain.
“Yes, indeed, it has been raining,” she said. Then she suddenly shrank up and wagged her head. It looked as if she were about to take a leap.
“Koax,” she said, “it is wet; it is wet; it is dull as ditch water—in good old Sorö.” She had become a frog.
“Koax” and then once more she was the old woman.
“One must dress according to the weather,” said she. “It is wet, it is wet. My town is like a bottle; you get in by the neck and you have to come out the same way again.”
The old woman’s voice sounded just like the croaking of frogs, or the creaking of fishing boots when you walk in the swamp. It was always the same sound, so tiresome, so tiresome that little Tuk fell into a deep sleep, which was the best thing for him.
But even in this sound sleep he had a dream, or something of the sort. His little sister, Gustave, with the blue eyes and golden, curly hair, had all at once become a lovely grown up girl and, without having wings, she could fly. So Gustave and Tuk flew together right across Zealand, over the green woods and deep blue waters.
“Do you hear the cock crowing, little Tuk? The hens come flying up from Kiöge town. You shall have such a big, big chicken yard. You will be a rich and happy man! Your house shall hold up its head like the king’s towers, and be richly built up with marble statues like those in Præstö.
“Your name will spread round the world with praise like the ship which was to have sailed from Korsöer; and it will be known as far as Rœskilde town.”
Little Tuk seemed to hear all this in his dreams, but he suddenly woke up. It was bright daylight, and he sprang out of bed and read his book. He found that he knew all the towns in his geography book almost at once.
The old washerwoman put her head in at the door, nodded to him and said—
“Many thanks for your help of yesterday, you dear child. May you have the wish of your heart!”
But little Tuk hurried off to school with his book under his arm. He knew that he had already the wish of his heart—he had learned his geography lesson.
STORIES SELECTED BECAUSE OF THEIR STIMULUS TO A CHILD’S MEMORY
| The Little Pine Tree That Wished for New Leaves | In For the Children’s Hour |
| The Story of the Morning Glory Seed | Emilie Poulsson, in In the Child’s World |
| The Seed Babies’ Blanket | Mary Gaylord, in For the Children’s Hour |
| About Angels | Laura Richards, in The Golden Windows |
| The Cry Fairy | Alice Brown, in The One-Footed Fairy |
| The Disappointed Bush | Thornton Burgess, in Mother West Wind’s Children |
| How the Camel Got His Hump | Rudyard Kipling, in Just So Stories |
CHAPTER VII
THE INSTINCT STORY
A NEWLY hatched chicken begins its daily work of living and providing for itself by scratching the earth in a phenomenally short space of time after it has chipped its shell. A baby notices a kitten and stretches out its hands to grasp in them a colored flower at almost the same period of its development as when it smiles at its mother. The chicken and the baby are alike in being creatures of instinct. The chicken scratches because its mother scratched for a living in the days of her chicken-hood and so did her mother and as many other hens and chickens as many previous years as one can count. The baby feels himself akin with the cat and loves the flower because his ancestors lived in close comradeship with animals and nature. From these and from an analysis of many other phases of instinct we may come at a working definition of the phenomenon.
Instinct may be defined as inherited memory.
It may be said that a child starts out on his life journey with a certain amount of brain capital which is his gift at birth. He has no knowledge of the outside world at birth. Color, sound, heat, cold and like concepts are unknown to him and he must make them his through the medium of his senses. The will to use his senses in the acquiring of useful information constitutes his brain capital, however. Instinctively he claims brotherhood with the animal world, and instinctively also he claims kinship with trees and flowers and winter and summer and birds and the gleaming earth. Pebbles and shells and sand and seeds interest him with a compellingness beyond our understanding until we remember that a child is the epitome of all the ages of the race which have combined to make us and our civilization. The age when man bartered with pebbles, decorated his person with shells, lived in a cave and found his food in seeds and berries is exemplified in the little chap at play on the beach with these same nature materials.
This mind capital of instinct with which the child comes into the world may be divided into the instinct to express ideas in bodily movements, instinctive interest in animals and nature, the instinct in rhythm, and the instinct for self-preservation (less highly developed in children than in animals.) There are other and finer divisions into which the different phases and manifestations of instinct fall but for purposes of our discussion these more elastic divisions will serve. The first division, the motor instinct, involves so much in the matter of a child’s dramatizing of stories that it needs a chapter devoted wholly to a study of a child’s bodily expression as stimulated by the images which he has in his mind. The instinct in rhythm, instinctive love of animals and nature, the self-preservation and curiosity instincts may be briefly considered in order of their appearance in the child’s development, having in mind their influence upon the stories we select for a child’s hearing. A financier makes it his special study to discover the best uses to which he can put his capital in order to make it produce for him appreciable dividends. The story teller, using the child mind capital, instinct, as a basis for her selection of stories will find that there are certain instinct stories that she may select for her use, each one of which gives back good returns to her along the measure of child interest.
Instinctive interest in rhythmic movements and rhythmic sounds is found in the very young child. He likes to be trotted, sung to in a monotonous, sing-song fashion; he enjoys clapping his hands in time to some nursery jingle or ditty. Long after this rhythmic period of babyhood is past children like to hear stories that have the rhythmic, repetitional quality, or some jingle introduced that stimulates rhythm. Predominantly is this rhythmic quality found in Mother Goose and folk lore. Children, even of kindergarten age, take the greatest delight in repeating and singing over and over again such rhythmic ditties as:
“Pitty, patty polt; shoe the wild colt.
Here a nail, there a nail, pitty, patty polt.”
“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man
Bake me a cake as fast as you can,
Pat it and prick it, and mark it with T,
And put it in the oven for Tommy and me.”
“Intry, mintry, cutry corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, brier, limber, lock.
Three geese in a flock.
One flew East and one flew West,
And one flew over the black-bird’s nest.”
The appeal for the child in the case of all such jingles is a bodily, instinctive one. This instinctive interest in rhythm is the beginning of bodily expression. The repetition of sounds, even though they are meaningless, makes the child feel the story. It gets into his muscles, so to speak, if we may put a psychological fact into physiological terms.
Nearly all of the old folk tales are characterized by this rhythmic swinging-along mode of construction. We all know how children wait breathlessly, and then fairly bubble over with ecstatic mirth as they listen to “The Teeny Tiny Lady,” “The House that Jack Built,” and “The Kid Who Would Not Go.” They literally wait spellbound for such phrases as:
“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.”
The Three Little Pigs.
“First she leaped and then she ran,
Till she came to the cow and thus began.”
The Cat and The Mouse.
“Fallen into the fire, and so will you,
On, little Drummikin, tum, tum, too.”
The Story of Lambikin.
Sheer nonsense, we say? Possibly, for the ears of adults, but for a child it means instinct food. This doggerel verse belongs to a certain stage of his development just as folk songs and war songs of quite as strange content have come down to us from primitive races; and a very sure way of securing a child’s involuntary attention to a story is to select it having in mind its rhythmic content.
Instinctive interest in animals and nature follows the rhythm instinct. This should not be construed into a statement that science and biology should be given children in the story form at an early age. Rather should the world about the child be presented to him on the plane of kinship, his one-ness with it. He is the little Hiawatha, friend of the trees, the deer, the birds, and the stars. Through this friendly introduction to the world of Nature, a child will come to know it, appreciate it, and eventually understand it.
The animal and nature stories that make the strongest appeal to the child’s primitive nature instinct are those which, without mis-stating scientific facts, still make nature of a size with, friendly to, companionable with the child.
King of animal story tellers was Joel Chandler Harris. His “Nights With Uncle Remus” is a book of instinct, race stories. Bre’r Rabbit is an immortal human who walks side by side with a child, holding familiar intercourse with him and telling him the secrets of field and wood and stream. Rudyard Kipling, in the “Jungle Books” and the “Just So Stories” has met the instinct story needs of children by making the wild creatures of the jungle and desert vivid, human and companionable. The fables of the Chinese, of Bidpai and of Æsop have an instinctive interest for all children because they are human documents, an attempted explanation of the moral code, put quaintly by primitive races into the mouths of animals.
Nature stories that meet the instinctive interests of children are less easy for the story teller to find than are good animal stories. The modern nature story that is written about some dry scientific fact is only a bare husk when a child is crying for real food. It would be better to tell a child as a plain statement of a universal fact that the cold mercifully kills the plant that has served its use of reproduction of species that it may make way for another season’s cycle of buds and blooms, than to tell a story about Jack Frost who, airily attired in white, skips about the garden and puts the flowers to sleep. Better, however, than this former bald statement of the year’s autumnal death that presages the awakening to new life in the spring is it to tell children the story of “Ceres and Persephone.” Always, afterward, will the bleak winter suggest to their minds Persephone’s sojourn with Pluto and spring will herald her return to her mother, the flowers springing up for gladness wherever she steps.
The myth meets every child’s instinctive interest.
It is a type of story that has been left us by every race and people as the explanation that primitive minds made of natural phenomenon. Suppose a myth isn’t true. Was the Jack Frost story true; and isn’t there more real literature and imagery and inspiration in the story of Persephone than in any modern “Nature-faked” story? As a child stands on Mount Olympus in company with the gods he gets a vision of the universe that he would gain in no other way. As he rides in Phaëton’s chariot searching for the Apples of Hesperides and helps old Atlas hold the world upon his shoulders he is learning Nature as no text-book can teach her. As he listens to the murmuring of the trees he hears the pipes of Pan and the loving whispers of old Baucis and Philemon among their branches.
We will feed the child’s instincts with the old myths if we wish to secure his lasting interest in nature.
A trifle more difficult for the story teller to meet is the child’s instinct for self preservation. In the case of the lower animals this instinct manifests itself in a perpetual warfare waged tooth and nail against its life enemies, with a result epitomized, always, in the survival of the stronger animal. Primitive man waged a similar warfare. With a peaceful civilization this condition of individual warfare has been done away with, but the instinct to fight for his rights, to preserve his ego, to keep selfishly for his own certain things is a part of the child’s mental heritage from his forbears. The rhythm instinct, the Nature instinct are the gold mine in child development. The self instinct, while in a measure necessary in fitting a child for the life struggle, should be, to a certain extent, inhibited. This inhibition may be brought about through the medium of stories.
Selecting just the right ethical stories to tell a child having in mind making him unselfish is a delicate matter. Each story should present some problem in ethics that is likely to come up in the child’s life. Moreover, the moral of the story should be veiled but made so obvious by the suspensive treatment and climax of the story, that the child unconsciously makes it his own and applies the lesson to his own life. The moral of unselfishness is rather the result of the story than a part of it as the children make its obvious application to their own lives.
The well-known folk tale of “The Little Red Hen” teaches a lesson of unselfishness. The selfish pig, cat and frog are deprived of their portion of the freshly baked loaf of bread because they had no share in its making. Kipling’s story, “How the Camel Got his Hump” in the “Just So Stories” has the same moral of forgetfulness of self. Laura E. Richards’ story, “The Coming of the King,” beautifully illustrates the type of story that inhibits the selfish instinct. It draws a wonderful word picture of the children’s garden made ready for the King and finally welcoming a beggar in ministering to whose needs, however, the children find joy.
The most classic of unselfish stories in the English language is Oscar Wilde’s “Selfish Giant.” It needs no word of introduction or explanation. It illuminates our dull subject of endeavoring to make children self forgetful through the stimulus of the ethical story.