songs are pleasant for this reason.

_Silverlocks and the Three Bears_ is an example of a story that has many
attractive features. Silverlocks is an interesting girl, because she is
mischievous and adventurous. The pupils know a good deal about bears and
wild animals from picture books, stories, and perhaps the travelling
menageries. The bears have all proper names--Rough Bruin, Mammy Muff,
and Tiny; this gives an air of reality to the story. The bears speak in
short, characteristic sentences.

Silverlocks runs away from home, goes into the woods, and finds a lonely
house which is the home of the bears. They are not at home, so she
enters. These actions suggest mystery and adventure.

The construction of the story shows two chief divisions, with three
subdivisions. The second division begins with the return of the bears.
They find the soup has been tasted, the chairs disturbed, and the beds
rumpled; their conversation is interesting, and their tones
characteristic. Tiny, the little bear, suffers most; he enlists the
sympathy of the children, as he has lost his dinner and his chair is
broken. He discovers Silverlocks, but she escapes and "never runs away
from home any more".

SENIOR FORMS (BOOKS III AND IV)

1. In these Forms, the pupil's imagination is still strong, though less
fantastic and under better control, and hence stories involving a large
element of imagination retain their charm at this stage. The myth, and
longer and more involved fairy tales, such as Ruskin's _King of the
Golden River_, Hawthorne's _Wonder Book_, and Kingsley's _Greek Heroes_,
are read with avidity.

2. Stories involving _a number of incidents_ are wonderfully attractive.
This is due to the pupil's instinctive interest in action and
personality. Children are more deeply interested in persons who _do_
things than in those who _become_ something else than they were. A
description of some evolution of character very soon palls, but a
stirring tale of heroic deeds exerts a powerful fascination. This
explains the attractiveness of the hero tale, the story of adventure,
and the stirring historical narrative. The action should have the merit
of artistic moderation. Stories in which there is a carnival of action,
for example, the "dime thriller", under whose spell so many boys fall,
must be avoided. Literature that leaves the mind so feverish that the
pupil loses interest in other subjects is worse than no literature. The
easiest way to pr