The Three Cakes
Once upon a time there was a little boy named Henry, who was away from his home at a boarding school.
He was a very special kind of boy, forever at his book, and he happened once to get to the very tip top of his class. His mother was told of it, and when it came morning, she got up early and went to speak with the cook as follows:
“Cook, you are to make a cake for Henry, who has been very good at school.”
“With all my heart,” said the cook, and she made a cake. It was as big as—let me see—as big as the moon. It was stuffed with nuts, and raisins, and figs, and candied fruit peel, and over it all was an icing of sugar, thick, and smooth, and very white. And no sooner was the cake home from the baking than the cook put on her bonnet and carried it to the school.
When Henry first saw it, he jumped up and down. He was not patient enough to wait for a knife, but he fell upon the cake tooth and nail. He ate and ate until school began, and after school was over he ate again with his might and main. At night he ate until bedtime, and he put the cake under his bolster when he went to bed and he waked and waked a dozen times that he might take a bite.
But the next day when the dinner bell rang, Henry was not hungry, and was vexed to see how heartily the other children ate. His friends asked him if he would not play at cricket, tan, or kits. Ah! Henry could not; so they played without him, and Henry could scarcely stand upon his legs. He went and sat down in a corner, and the head master sent for the apothecary to come with all his phials of physic. After some days Henry was well again, but his mother said that she would never let him have another cake.
Now there was another scholar in the same school, whose name was Francis. He had written his mother a very pretty letter without one misspelled word or blot, and so his mother, like the mother of Henry, sent him a great cake.
Francis decided that he would not be so unwise as to follow the example of Henry, so he took the cake, which was so heavy that he could hardly lift it, and he watched to see that no one was looking, and he slipped up to his chamber and put the cake in his box under lock and key. Every day at play time he used to slip away from his companions, go upstairs on tiptoe, and cut off a tolerable slice of his cake which he would eat by himself. For a whole week did he keep this up, but alas—the cake was so exceedingly large! At last the cake grew dry, and quickly after it became moldy. Finally the maggots got into it, and Francis, with great reluctance, was obliged to throw it away.
There was a third little gentleman who went to the same school as Henry and Francis, and his name was Gratian. One day his mother, whom he loved very dearly, sent him a cake because she also loved him. No sooner had it arrived than Gratian called his friends all about him, and said:
“Come! Look at what my mother has sent me. You must, each one, have a piece.” So the children all got around the cake as bees resort to a flower, just blown, and Gratian divided the cake with a knife into as many pieces as he had invited boys, with one piece over, for himself. His own piece he said he would eat the next day, and he began playing games with the boys.
But a very short time had passed, as they were playing, when a poor man who was carrying a fiddle came into the school yard. He had a very long, gray beard, and he was guided by a little dog who went before him, for the old man was blind.
The children noticed how dexterous was the little dog in leading, and how he shook a bell which hung underneath his collar, as if to say:
“Do not throw down or run against my master!”
When the two had come into the yard, the old man sat down upon a stone, and said:
“My dear little gentlemen, I will play you all the pretty tunes that I know, if you will give me leave.”
The children wished for nothing half so much as to hear the music, so the old man put his violin in tune and then played over jigs and tunes that had been new in former times.
But Gratian, who was standing close to him, noticed that while he played his jolliest airs, a tear would often roll down his cheeks. And Gratian asked him why he wept.
“Because,” said the old man, “I am hungry. I have not any one in the world to feed me, or my faithful dog.”
Then Gratian felt like crying, too, and he ran to fetch the cake which he had saved to eat himself. He brought it out with joy, and as he ran along he said:
“Here, good man, here is some cake for you.”
Then Gratian put the cake into the old man’s hands and he, laying down his fiddle, wiped his eyes and began to eat. At every piece he put into his mouth he gave a bit to his faithful little dog, who ate from his hand; and Gratian, standing by, had as much pleasure as if he had eaten the cake himself.
From the French of Monsieur Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfants—1784
STORIES SELECTED BECAUSE OF THEIR SENSE APPEAL TO THE CHILD’S MIND
CHAPTER III
WHEN THE CURTAIN RISES
A TIRED-OUT, unenthusiastic school teacher in one of our large public schools was recently endeavoring to secure the attention of her class for a story. This story hour was, for her, just one lap in the march of the day’s routine, a period to be finished as soon as possible, and she began it in a stereotyped way.
“I am going to tell you a story, children,” she said, “and I want every child in the room to sit up straight, put his feet flat on the floor and fold his hands. When everybody is ready, I will begin.”
In contrast one is reminded of another teacher, who opened her story hour in a different way. In point of fact, she did not really open it at all in the formal understanding of the word. Nor did she have any specified period of the day for telling stories. When her class was fatigued and needed a note of relaxation, when they were restless and needed calming, when they seemed to need inspiration, she gave the signal for books and pencils to be put away and with no further introduction she took the children with her to Story Land for a space, opening her story in so interesting a way that she compelled attention without asking for it.
The instance of the first story teller is an example of securing a child’s voluntary attention.
The second story teller illustrated a method of securing a child’s involuntary, almost unconscious attention.
Especially in the case of the little child who is beginning his school work, and even up to the more mature years of childhood, voluntary attention, that mental operation in which the will is called upon to open the doors of the senses and let in knowledge, is almost too much for us to ask of a child. The wonderful machinery of the mind has provided another and much more economic means of knowledge acquisition. Certain mind stimuli will set the whole wireless system of perception, association and memory going without any effort on the part of the story teller save that of discovering the stimuli. In other words, we must secure involuntary attention in children through studying their interests. The story that opens with headlines of child interest as compelling as those of one of our yellow news sheets will hold a child’s attention without his being in the least conscious of his attitude of mind toward it. Voluntary attention, the mind attitude toward a story that is brought about by folded hands and straight backs, is very likely to lapse, to develop a will-o’-the-wisp character and finally lose itself. Concentrated attention can be secured in children only through the medium of appealing to child interest.
The successful story teller will bear in mind the fact, in selecting stories to tell, that the good story for children of any age, and adults too, for that matter, should have one of the qualities that characterize a successful drama. It must catch the attention of the audience the moment the curtain rises. There must be no long explanation, no descriptive scenes and painful dragging in of the plot. Children do not care a rap for the creating of atmosphere. They do not care how long ago the story events happened, or why they happened. What they are eager for is a quick story appeal made the second that the story curtain rolls up.
Each story told to children ought to be selected having in mind its beginning. The story teller must ask herself another set of questions:
“Does the story interest begin with my first paragraph, my first sentence, my first word?”
“Will the opening of my story find an apperceptive basis for attention in the minds of my children?”
“Has my story a sense appeal in the first sentence?”
Any one of these qualities of story opening will help to win the sympathy of the child audience and will find a ready response in involuntary attention.
A class of little street boys waged continued warfare upon one of the New York Settlement Houses. They broke the windows, mobbed the Settlement children and carefully evaded the police. The Settlement story teller decided, one night, to open the doors of the house to the gang of boys and see if it would not be possible to win them over to an interest in the work of the Settlement and lead them to obey the laws of society through stories. The boys entered the building like a besieging army. They shouted, stamped, stampeded into the room that had been assigned them and throwing down chairs and overturning tables they proceeded to produce a scene of Bedlam. The story teller made no effort to control the boys. She secured for herself a place of vantage in the center of the room. When there was an instant’s lull in the uproar that the boys were making, as they took breath for more rowdyism, she said in a low, even tone of voice:
“There was once a little Indian boy who rode fifty miles on the cow-catcher of an engine.”
Then she waited and the boys waited, too, breathlessly eager for her next words. When she saw that she had caught the interest of her audience, she proceeded with the story in the same even, low voice, not so much telling the boys a story, apparently, but just telling a story, every sentence of which painted a word picture and the whole being a graphic series of moving pictures unrolled on a story film before her audience. She gave the story facts about the Indian lad who had never seen a locomotive and stole a daring ride on one because he thought it was a fire-horse. One by one the boys seated themselves quietly on the chairs or on the floor to listen. Several lay flat upon the floor, crawling stealthily nearer to the story teller as their interest in the story deepened. Throughout the entire telling of the story the room was absolutely still, and when the climax came the boys asked for another story. From that evening they were the Settlement’s stanch allies.
It would have been impossible to secure the voluntary attention of these boys. The fact that some one wanted to tell them a story would have probably inspired them to more lawlessness. If the story teller had begun the story after this fashion:—
“Fifty years ago there were few railways in the western part of our country. The prairies were peopled by Comanche tribes who were unfamiliar with the inventions of civilization, and the first train that ran through an Indian settlement inspired an Indian lad to a strange deed”—
Not a boy would have listened. This form of story beginning is bad and phenomenally common in many stories for children. It is an example of words, not interest stimuli. It explains a story situation instead of presenting it. A story to secure the involuntary attention of children should have the quality of a crashing orchestral overture, a thunder clap, a pistol shot—so unexpected, compelling, and penetrating will it be.
“There was once a little Indian boy who rode fifty miles on the cow-catcher of an engine!”
Could there be a more stimulating story beginning for a group of boys than this? There is an apperceptive appeal in the Indian lad. He was not a man, not a chieftain, but just a little lad like themselves. There is an immediate sense appeal in the steam-engine image that the story beginning brings to their minds. Smoke, smell, bell ringing, whistle blowing, steam escaping, and the rattle of iron wheels on iron tracks are all recalled to a boy’s mind in one glorious bit of imagination whose only stimulus is the word engine. Then, to clinch the apperceptive and sensory appeal of the sentence, is the quick introduction of a new story interest—the Indian boy did a deed that they, in their wildest dreams, had never considered—he rode an engine.
If a story, otherwise good, opens poorly—is too wordy, too descriptive, too pedantic—study the story carefully for its main interest and, selecting just the right words to convey this overture of interest, begin there. It will be discovered that certain of the classic, favorite tales of childhood fulfill this story test. They open compellingly and carry the interest that was stimulated in the first paragraph clear through to the end.
“There were once five and twenty tin soldiers who were all brothers, for they had been made out of the same old tin spoon.”
Hans Christian Andersen used the child’s instinctive love of counting his toys, and a bit of humor that tickles a child’s fancy, when he wrote this opening paragraph of his wonderful old allegory, “The Faithful Tin Soldier.”
“Once upon a time there lived a cat and a parrot and they thought they would ask each other to dinner, turn and turn about.”
This folk tale of “The Greedy Cat” opens with a strong sense appeal. The children’s interest aroused in the first sentence by means of the progressive dinner arrangement of the famous cat is sustained to the last word of the story.
“He was a wee little duck with a very long tail, so he was called Drakestail. Now Drakestail had some money of his very, very own and the King asked if he might take it. So Drakestail loaned all his money to the King—”
In this old folk tale, the gist of which is the merry adventures of a duck, the story interest begins with the first sentence. The children are introduced, with no unnecessary preliminaries of description or explanation to the hero, Drakestail, and then they are plunged into the story itself, interesting and direct in its appeal.
“Some children were at play in their playground one day, when a herald rode through the town, blowing a trumpet and crying aloud: ‘The King! The King is coming!’”
In this story, Laura E. Richards’ “Coming of the King,” to be found in her collection of short stories, “The Golden Windows,” a strong sense appeal commands the child’s involuntary attention at the beginning of the story. The familiar figures, children at play in their playground, are introduced to the sound of a trumpet’s call, instantly attracting the attention of the child listeners.
Once the story teller has learned story selection, having in mind a beginning that will hold the attention of her audience from her first word, her success will be secured. It is also possible to carry this interest which has been secured for the child the instant that the curtain rolls up, straight through to the end of the story, because of its compelling beginning. The opening paragraph of a child’s story should be the theme, tuned to the key and melody of child interest about which and on which the rest of the story plays. The noteworthy dinner of the cat and the mouse forms the keynote for the rest of the classic adventures of the Greedy Cat. The “wee little duck” and the avaricious old King whom we meet in the first paragraph are the main actors in the story drama of Drakestail. The playground of the children that we see in the first sentence of Mrs. Richards’ “The Coming of the King,” is the scene of a story miracle almost unparalleled in short story writing for children.
Cutting out unnecessary description, avoiding any explanation as to why you are telling the story, introducing your thunder clap, your trumpet, your story hero in the first sentence—this is the way to begin a story.
“The Prince’s Visit,” by Horace Scudder, is an excellent example of sustained story interest brought about by means of a compelling story opening.