s, folk-lore depend for their significance and beauty alike
upon a grasp of present social values which a young child cannot have
and that our first attention should be to give him those values in terms
intelligible to him. After we have done that he is safe. It matters
little what we give him so long as it is good: for he will have
standards by which to judge our offerings for himself.

Yet after all is said and done, we may be reduced to giving children
some of the stories we think inappropriate, for lack of something
better. But a recognition of the need may evoke a great writer for
children. I maintain we have never had one of the first order. The best
books that we have for children are throw-offs from artists primarily
concerned with adults,--Kipling and Stevenson stand in this group,--or
child versions of adult literature,--from Charles and Mary Lamb down.
The world has yet to see a genuinely great creator whose real vision is
for children. When children have _their_ Psalmist, _their_ Shakespeare,
_their_ Keats, they will not be offered diluted adult literature.

So after we have gathered what we can from the world's store for
children of this seven-to-eight-year old period I think we shall find
many unfilled gaps. Most attempts at humor, for instance, are on the
level of the comic sheet of the Sunday supplement or the circus. There
is little except a few of the "drolls" which give the child pure fun
unmixed with excitement or confusion. Even "Alice in Wonderland" when
first read to a six-year-old who was used to rational thinking and
talking was pronounced "Too funny!" This same boy, however, went back
to Alice again and again. He always relished such bits as:

"Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes,
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases."

No child's world is complete without humor. And children have a sense of
the preposterous, the inappropriate all their own. Lewis Carroll and a
few others have occasionally found it. Still, I think much remains to be
done in the way of studying the things that children themselves find
amusing. This is true for the younger ones as well. I give several
younger children's stories which appeared both to the tellers and their
audiences to be convulsing. The humor is strangely physical and
amazingly simple. And it is all fresh.

STORIES BY FOUR-YEAR-OLDS

I dreamed I was asleep in a tomato and just scramble