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.