ext?' He jumped right out of a fire.
Auntie, can you smile? (For aunties cannot smile when people are
naughty.)"

The third story is said to have been filled with pauses due to a certain
slowness of speech, but the pauses are "lit by the lightning flash of a
flying eyebrow, and the impressive nodding of a silken head."

"Once, you know, there was a fight between a little pony and a lion, and
the lion sprang against the pony and the pony put his back against a
stack and bited towards the lion, and the lion rolled over and the pony
jumped up, and he ran up ... and the pony turned round and the lion ..."

His mother felt she had lost the thread. "Which won?" she asked. "Which
won!" he repeated and after a moment's pause he said, "Oh! the little
bear."

This surprising conclusion points to a stage when it is difficult for a
child to hold the thread of a narrative, and at this stage, along with
simple stories of little ones like themselves, repetition or
"accumulation" stories seem to give most pleasure. "Henny Penny" and
"Billy Bobtail"--told by Jacobs as "How Jack went to seek his
Fortune"--are prime favourites. Repetition of rhythmic phrases has a
great attraction, as in "Three Little Pigs," with its delightful
repetition of "Little pig, little pig, let me come in," "No, no, by the
hair of my chinny chin chin," "Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll
blow your house in."

Very soon, however, the children are ready for the time-honoured
fairy-tale or folk-tale.

The orthodox beginning, "Once upon a time, in a certain country there
lived ...," fits the stage when neither time nor place is of any
consequence. Animals speak, well why not, we can! The fairies
accomplish wonders, again why not? Wonderful things do happen and they
must have a wonderful cause, and, as one child said, if there never had
been any fairies, how could people have written stories about them?
Goodness is rewarded and wickedness is punished, as is only right in the
child's eyes, and goodness usually means kindness, the virtue best
understood of children. Obedience is no doubt the nursery virtue in the
eyes of authority, but kindness is much more human and attractive.

"Both child and man," says Froebel, "desire to know the significance of
what happens around them; this is the foundation of Greek choruses,
especially in tragedy, and of many productions in the realm of legends
and fairy-tales. It is the result of the deep-rooted consciousness, the