The following I have chosen as repeated with intense appreciation and much dramatic vigour by a little boy just five years old:
There was an Old Man who said, “Hush!
I perceive a young bird in this bush!”
When they said, “Is it small?” he replied, “Not at all!
It is four times as big as the bush!”[32]
One of the most desirable of all elements to introduce into our stories is that which encourages kinship with animals. With very young children this is easy, because in those early years when the mind is not clogged with knowledge, the sympathetic imagination enables them to enter into the feelings of animals. Andersen has an illustration of this point in his “Ice Maiden”:
“Children who cannot talk yet can understand the language of fowls and ducks quite well, and cats and dogs speak to them quite as plainly as Father and Mother; but that is only when the children are very small, and then even Grandpapa's stick will become a perfect horse to them that can neigh and, in their eyes, is furnished with legs and a tail. With some children this period ends later than with others, and of such we are accustomed to say that they are very backward, and that they have remained children for a long time. People are in the habit of saying strange things.”
Felix Adler says: “Perhaps the chief attraction of Fairy Tales is due to their representing the child as living in brotherly friendship with nature and all creatures. Trees, flowers, animals, wild and tame, even the stars are represented as comrades of children. That animals are only human beings in disguise is an axiom in the Fairy Tales. Animals are humanised, that is, the kinship between animal and human life is still keenly felt; and this reminds us of those early animistic interpretations of nature which subsequently led to doctrines of metempsychosis.”[33]
I think that beyond question the finest animal stories are to be found in the Indian Collections, of which I furnish a list in the Appendix.
With regard to the development of the love of nature through the telling of the stories, we are confronted with a great difficult in the elementary schools, because so many of the children have never been out of the towns, have never seen a daisy, a blade of grass and scarcely a tree, so that in giving, in form of a story, a beautiful description of scenery, you can make no appeal to the retrospective imagination, and only the rarely gifted child will be able to make pictures whilst listening to a style which is beyond his everyday use. Nevertheless, once in a way, when the children are in a quiet mood, not eager for action but able to give themselves up to the pure joy of sound, then it is possible to give them a beautiful piece of writing in praise of Nature, such as the following, taken from The Divine Adventure, by Fiona Macleod: