Stories and Story-telling

All the stories in this book have been tested with children. Favorites easily available in other collections have been omitted. The writer hopes that by providing the busy teacher with “tellable” stories, she may help to win for story-telling the dignity of established scholastic place.

The story will arouse and direct the pupil’s feelings. The school to-day is emphasizing the necessity of educating the heart, the climactic third of the three great H’s,—the Head, the Hand, and the Heart. And psychologists are telling us that to educate a child to be kind, unselfish, filial, reverent, gentle, courageous, good-tempered, to educate him to admire goodness, justice, valor, to be sensible of beauty, to aspire and make effort toward excellence, is as practicable as to train him to do or to make something. It calls for more delicate but not different treatment; working not by dictation, but by magnetic suggestion. The story-teller may render a great service to the individual and to the community by helping to form right feeling-habit.