| Page | |
| Glad comradeship with the gladness of a child | [Frontispiece] |
| “Good morning, little girl, where are you going?” | [54] |
| “Those who play and dance all summer must expect to dance hungry to bed in winter” | [71] |
| Offero ... began to cross the flood | [109] |
| “Entreat me not to leave thee” | [133] |
| When Jesus was a boy | [153] |
| Stone marking the line of the Minute Men at Lexington | [215] |
| Grace, pulling at one oar, and her father at the other | [237] |
| Helen Keller | [286] |
Part I
The Art of Story-Telling
I
VALUE OF STORIES
Stories are the language of childhood. They are mirrors of nature in which the child beholds his natural face “as in a glass.” They appeal to every instinct of child nature. They feed every interest of the soul. They strike a responsive chord in every awakening faculty of the unfolding life. Boys and girls love stories as they love no other form of address. Stories afford amusement and entertainment as play does, for they are the mind’s play, as well as its natural soul-food.
Story-telling is as old as human speech. It was enjoyed by the primitive children of all races and lands, as it is enjoyed by the boys and girls of to-day. There is no better way to convey our ideas, to widen knowledge, experience, and sympathy, or to impress moral truth. Stories with plenty of life and action in them leave nothing to explain. Conduct pictured in them needs no application or obtrusive moral. Good stories, well adapted and well told, not only furnish amusement and hold attention as no other form of speech does, but possess positive value in many other directions. They feed, exercise, and cultivate the imagination; appeal to the emotions; arouse the will; strengthen the power of concentration; develop the sense of beauty; stimulate the idealizing instinct; help to shape thought and language; widen the child’s sympathies and fellowships; broaden his world interests; prepare for future understanding of literary classics, especially poetry; implant ideas of right and wrong; and, in short, make the most lasting impressions of an ethical, esthetic, educational, and cultural nature.