ax, it is
important to give your hearers time for the full savour of the jest to
permeate their consciousness. It is really robbing an audience of its
rights, to pass so quickly from one point to another that the mind must
lose a new one if it lingers to take in the old. Every vital point in a
tale must be given a certain amount of time: by an anticipatory pause,
by some form of vocal or repetitive emphasis, and by actual time. But
even more than other tales does the funny story demand this. It cannot
be funny without it.

Everyone who is familiar with the theatre must have noticed how careful
all comedians are to give this pause for appreciation and laughter.
Often the opportunity is crudely given, or too liberally offered; and
that offends. But in a reasonable degree the practice is undoubtedly
necessary to any form of humorous expression.

A remarkably good example of the type of humorous story to which these
principles of method apply, is the story of _Epaminondas_ on page 92. It
will be plain to any reader that all the several funny crises are of the
perfectly unmistakable sort children like, and that, moreover, these
funny spots are not only easy to see; they are easy to foresee. The
teller can hardly help sharing the joke in advance, and the tale is an
excellent one with which to practise for power in the points mentioned.

Epaminondas is a valuable little rascal from other points of view, and
I mean to return to him, to point a moral. But at the moment I want
space for a word or two about the matter of variety of subject and style
in school stories.

There are two wholly different kinds of story which are equally
necessary for children, I believe, and which ought to be given in about
the proportion of one to three, in favour of the second kind; I make the
ratio uneven because the first kind is more dominating in its effect.

The first kind is represented by such stories as _The Pig Brother_,[1]
which has now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for
illustration without repetition here. It is the type of story which
specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of
a fable or an allegory,--it passes on to the child the conclusions as to
conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained
through centuries of experience and moralising. The story becomes an
inescapable part of the outfit of received ideas on manners and morals
which is a necessary possession of