The great point is never to let the audience quite down, that is, in stories which depend on dramatic situations. It is just a question of shade and colour in the language. If you are telling a story in sections, and spread over two or three occasions, you should always stop at an exciting moment. It encourages speculation between whiles in the children's minds, which increases their interest when the story is taken up again.
Another very necessary quality in the mere artifice of story-telling is to watch your audience, so as to be able to know whether its mood is for action or reaction, and to alter your story accordingly. The moods of reaction are rarer, and you must use them for presenting a different kind of material. Here is your opportunity for introducing a piece of poetic description, given in beautiful language, to which the children cannot listen when they are eager for action and dramatic excitement.
Perhaps one of the greatest artifices is to take a quick hold of your audience by a striking beginning which will enlist their attention from the start; you can then relax somewhat, but you must be careful also of the end, because that is what remains most vivid for the children. If you question them as to which story they like best in a programme, you will constantly find it to be the last one you have told, which has for the moment blurred out the others.
Here are a few specimens of beginnings which seldom fail to arrest the attention of the child:
“There was once a giant ogre, and he lived in a cave by himself.”
—From “The Giant and the Jackstraws,” Starr Jordan.
“There were once twenty-five tin soldiers, who were all brothers, for they had been made out of the same old tin spoon.”
—From “The Tin Soldier,” Hans C. Andersen.
“There was once an Emperor who had a horse shod with gold.”
—From “The Beetle,” Hans C. Andersen.
“There was once a merchant who was so rich that he could have paved the whole street with gold, and even then he would have had enough for a small alley.”
—From “The Flying Trunk,” Hans C. Andersen.
“There was once a shilling which came forth from the mint springing and shouting, 'Hurrah! Now I am going out into the wide world.'”
—From “The Silver Shilling,” Hans C. Andersen.
“In the High and Far Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk.”
—From “The Elephant's Child”: Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling.