hat a child outgrows the familiar. It is
rather that as he matures, he sees new relationships in the old. If our
stories would follow his lead, they should not seek for unfamiliar and
strange stuff in intrigue him; they should seek to deepen and enrich
the relationships by which he is dimly groping to comprehend and to
order his familiar world.

But to return to the younger children. Children of four are not
nearly so completely ego-centric as those of three. There has seemed
to me to be a distinct transition at this age to a more objective way of
thinking. A four-year-old does not to the same extent have to be a part
of every situation he conceives of. Ordinarily, too, he moves out from
his own narrowly personal environment into a slightly wider range of
experiences. Now, what in this wider environment gets his spontaneous
attention? What does he take from the street life, for instance, to make
his own? Surely it is moving things. He is still primarily motor in his
interest and expression and remains so certainly up to six years.
Engines, boats, wagons with horses, all animals, his own moving
self,--these are the things he notices and these are the things he
interprets in his play activities. Transportation and animals and
himself. Do not these pretty well cover the field of his interests? If
conceived of as motor and personal do they not hold all the material a
four-or five-year-old needs for stories? If we bring in inanimate
unmoving things, we must do with them what he does. We must endow them
with life and motion. We need not be afraid of personification. This is
the age when anthropomorphism flourishes. The five-year-old is still
motor; his conception of cause is still personal. He thinks through his
muscles; he personifies in his thought and his play.

Nevertheless there is very real danger in anthropomorphism,--in thus
leaving the world of reality. There is danger of confusing the child. We
must be sure our personifications are built on relationships which our
child can understand and which have an objective validity. We must be
sure that a wolf remains a wolf and an engine an engine, though endowed
with human speech.

Now, what are the typical relationships which a four-or five-year-old
uses to bind together his world into intelligible experiences? We have
already noted the personal relationship which persists in modified form.
But does not the grouping of things because of physical juxtaposition
now give wa