icular occasion and to the particular child. Perhaps
some time we shall achieve a fortunate compromise, a stepping stone
between the story told and the story read. Perhaps we shall work out
happy or characteristic phrases about familiar things,--little personal
things about the clothes and habits of each child, general familiar
things like autos and wagons and horses on the street, coal going down
the hole in the sidewalk, the squabbling of sparrows in the dirt, the
drift of snow on the roofs,--perhaps we shall learn to use such
thought-out phrases or refrains like blocks for building many stories.
If we could work out some such technique as this, we could keep the
intimacy, the flexibility, the waywardness of the spoken story and still
give the children the charm of careful thinking and careful phrasing.
Many such phrases have been fashioned by people sensitive to the quality
of sound. Every nursery has had its rooster crow:

"Cock-a-doodle-doo!"

But few have given its children that delightful epitome of the songs of
spring birds which has piped with irrepressible freshness now for nearly
four centuries:

"Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!"

I have never known the child who did not respond to Kipling's engine
song:

"With a michnai-ghignai-shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!"

Every child creates these wonderful sound interpretations of the world.
We smile a smile of indulgence when we hear them. And then we forget
them! Cannot we seize some of them however imperfectly and learn to
build them into the structure of our stories? It was more or less this
kind of thing that I had in mind in writing Marni's stories and "The
Room with the Window Looking Out Upon the Garden" which as I have said
elsewhere are types to be told rather than narratives to be read. And I
feel sure if we could once make a beginning that the children themselves
would soon take the matter into their own hands and create their own
building blocks.

For children are primarily creators. They do not willingly nor for long
maintain the passive role. This should be reckoned with in stories and
not merely as a concession to restless children but as a real aid to
the story. An active role should be provided for the children somewhere
within every story until the children are old enough to have a genuinely
impersonal interest in things and events and until they do not need a
motor expression of their thoughts. For as I have already said, up
to