ct. The span to carry is two phrases in Mother Goose as against
four in Stevenson. The Vachel Lindsay I have found is as easily
remembered and as much enjoyed as Mother Goose, though it is a pity
it is about an unfamiliar animal. As for the Dinkey-bird even a
seven-year-old can hardly _hear_ the rhyme even if intellectually he
could follow the adult vocabulary and the complicated sentence with its
long postponed subject.

It is the same with stories. The classic tales which have held
small children,--"The Gingerbread Man," "The Three Little Pigs,"
"Goldylocks,"--have patterns so obvious and so simple that they cannot
be missed. In "The Gingerbread Man" the pattern is one of increasing
additions. It belongs to the aptly called "cumulative" tales. The
refrains act like sign-posts to help the child to mark the progress.
This is simply a skilful way of making the continuity close, of showing
the ladder rungs for the child's feet. I venture to say that any good
story-teller consciously or unconsciously puts up sign-posts to help the
children. If he is skilful, he makes a pattern of them so that they are
not merely intellectually helpful but charming as well. So Kipling in
his "Just So Stories" uses his sign-posts,--which are sometimes words,
sometimes phrases, sometimes situations,--in such a way that they ring
musically and give a pleasant sense of pattern even to children too
young to find them intellectually helpful.

In other words, the little child is not equipped psychologically to hear
complicated units. I wish some one could determine how the average
four-year-old hears the harmony of a chord on the piano. Is it much
except confusion? In the same way, he is not equipped to leap a span
between units. I wish some one would determine the four-year-old's
memory span for rhymes, for instance. The involutions, the
suggestiveness so attractive to adult ears, he cannot hear. Even an
adult ear, untutored, can scarcely hear the intermingling rhythms and
overlapping rhymes which blend like overtones of a chord in such verse
as Patmore's Ode "The Toys." I feel sure the small child cannot hear
complexities; he cannot leap gaps. And so he cannot understand when even
simple ideas are given in complex and discontinuous form. This explains
his notorious love of repetition. Repetition is the simplest of
patterns, simple enough to be enjoyed as pattern. I have found that
almost any simple phrase of music or words repeated slowly and w