e business for King Solomon, The Potatoes' Dance,
The King of Yellow Butterflies and Aladdin and the Jinn (The Congo,
page 140). In the last, "'I am your slave,' said the Jinn" was repeated
four times at the end of each stanza.

The Poem Game idea was first indorsed in the Wellesley kindergarten,
by the children. They improvised pantomime and dance for the Potatoes'
Dance, while the writer chanted it, and while Professor Hamilton C.
Macdougall of the Wellesley musical department followed on the piano
the outline of the jingle. Later Professor Macdougall very kindly wrote
down his piano rendition. A study of this transcript helps to confirm
the idea that when the cadences of a bit of verse are a little
exaggerated, they are tunes, yet of a truth they are tunes which can be
but vaguely recorded by notation or expressed by an instrument.
The author of this book is now against instrumental music
in this type of work. It blurs the English.

Professor Macdougall has in various conversations helped the author
toward a Poem Game theory. He agrees that neither the dancing
nor the chanting nor any other thing should be allowed to run away
with the original intention of the words. The chanting should not be
carried to the point where it seeks to rival conventional musical
composition. The dancer should be subordinated to the natural rhythms
of English speech, and not attempt to incorporate bodily all the
precedents of professional dancing.

Speaking generally, poetic ideas can be conveyed word by word, faster
than musical feeling. The repetitions in the Poem Games are to keep
the singing, the dancing and the ideas at one pace. The repetitions may
be varied according to the necessities of the individual dancer.
Dancing is slower than poetry and faster than music in developing the
same thoughts. In folk dances and vaudeville, the verse, music, and
dancing are on so simple a basis the time elements can be easily
combined. Likewise the rhythms and the other elements.

Miss Dougherty is particularly illustrative in her pantomime,
but there were many verses she looked over and rejected because
they could not be rendered without blurring the original intent.
Possibly every poem in the world has its dancer somewhere waiting,
who can dance but that one poem. Certainly those poems would be
most successful in games, where the tone color is so close to the
meaning that any exaggeration of that color by dancing and chanting