In the material we use for children, while it is not profitable to draw any close distinctions between romantic and realistic stories, we can not fail to distinguish in general between the hero-tale or the folk MÄrchen, where we must expect preternatural powers and marvelous events, and the story which purports to deal with real people, and with experiences which, however rare, are still possible or probable. And these stories of real people and actual experiences have their value for the children—their own value, first of all, as making a distinct contribution to the child's education, and another value as tending to counteract and balance the effects of the thoroughgoing romances. No one questions the fact that there are ill effects from too much romance and too many marvels. A child's vision of the world does become distorted if it is too often or too long organized upon a plan dominated by the wonderful or the fantastic; his sense of fact dulled, if his imagination is called upon to appreciate and to produce prevailingly the unusual combinations; his taste vitiated, if he is supplied too abundantly with those striking and super-emotional incidents which fill the romances. All these dangers are counteracted in part by the child's fact-studies, and by his experiences in actual life. But this is not sufficient; it is artistically due him that the antidote should have the same kind of charm as the original poison. It is well, too, to bear in mind that even the small children should be appealed to on several sides, and that their taste should be made as catholic as possible. One is sorry to find a child of eight or ten who likes only fairy-tales, or war-stories, or detective stories; he should like all stories.

But we are more interested, naturally, in the positive services performed by the stories of real life; or to be more explicit, those stories told with the effect of actuality, and with the atmosphere of verisimilitude. Of course, we should require of these stories good form and good writing, so that we may expect from them on that side what we expect from any good literature. In addition, we may expect them to perform for the children and for all of us certain distinctive artistic services. First, they operate to throw back upon actual life the glow of art. Those stories which use people and circumstances that we can match in our own actual surroundings and experiences impress upon us most vividly the fact, so important for our real culture both in art and in life, that literature is in a very real sense a presentation of life; that these charming people and things are but images taken up from the real world, chosen and raised to this level, by which very process they are invested with a halo of beauty and distinction. This nimbus of art casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. A group of children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable, found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer's window. The same children, having learned Lowell's phrase of the dandelion's "dusty gold," were not satisfied till they had made a beautiful phrase to render the burnished gold of the butter-cups. The same class on a picnic labored with ardor to make a beautiful verse about Uneeda biscuits and ginger-ale, to match the Persian's "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread." They were much baffled when they finally concluded that it would not go—that these modern and specific articles refused to wear a halo.

The obverse and counterpart of this glow caught by the actual world from art is the vital interest that surrounds a person, or an object, or a sentiment which we come upon in a poem or a story, and which we recognize as corresponding to something in our own experience—a recognition all the more satisfying if the correspondence be that of actual identity. Every teacher of younger children recalls at once the tingling interest they feel in practically every story they are told, as some incident or detail parallels or suggests something they have known—"My father has seen a bear;" "Once I found an eagle's feather;" "There are daffodils in my grandmother's garden." A little girl of ten had been given a very simple arrangement of a melody from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to play on the piano. Soon after she had learned it, she was taken to hear the symphony. When her melody came dropping in from the flutes and violins—birds and brooks and whispering leaves—she threw up at her friend a flash of radiant surprise and delight. Her whole soul stirred to see here—in this stately place, with the great orchestra, in the noble assemblage of glorious concords—her friend, her little song. For days she played it over many times every day, with the greatest tenderness of expression.

The wise teacher sees in this eager recognition and identification one of the most desirable results of literary experience, and utilizes it as the most precious of educational opportunities, since this mood of delighted recognition is with the younger children also the mood of creation, and with the older children the most useful and practical clue to the finding of their own literary material.

It is in this kind of story—those that reflect the events of actual life and are concerned with ordinary people—that we are able to introduce our children in art to their contemporaries and coevals. It means much for a child's consciousness that he should develop a quick and dramatic sympathy with lives other than his own, and yet like his own—with the experiences and characters of other children, other folks' ways of living. This sympathy is among the literary products, since it is best developed and fostered by literature; this because it is literature only, that handles its material in that concrete and emotional way which produces the impression of actual reality and serves as a substitute for it. Teach the little children Stevenson's

and teach it with the natural implications that will occur to any teacher of expedients, and you will have taught them a certain attitude of confidential understanding toward their brown brothers (in spite of the decidedly chauvinistic character of this masterpiece) that they would not have got out of a year of social history.

The difficulties of choosing stories of modern child-life for teaching in school are serious. They are most likely to be thin in material, flimsy in structure, trivial in style, sentimental in atmosphere, so that they fall to pieces under the test of study in a class of acute and questioning children. It is best not to choose any long book of this sort. For the younger children use the shorter bits of story, such as may be found in Laura Richards' Five Minute Stories, or such as any teacher may collect for herself from many sources; occasionally one may find a perfect specimen in one of the children's periodicals, and there is now a wealth of such things in verse. We must be wary of those books about children, interpretative of children, of which our own day has produced so many charming specimens, whose appeal is entirely to adults. Such are Pater's The Child in the House, and Kenneth Graham's The Golden Age. Part of A Child's Garden of Verses is of this kind. Of this sort, too, is the pretty little Emmy Lou, an interpretation of a child's consciousness, not a children's story.

The general question of the reading of juveniles will be left for a chapter of miscellanies farther on. It is not possible to make any long book about children the center of a class's work. Such material is best used as a sort of reserve, a recreation from time to time, and is best given in short stories that can be read at intervals; or if it be a long story, one that can be distributed among the other reading. It is true of this kind of story too, that the best results come of using material not made especially for children, but which appeals to children, however, because it appeals to universal and elemental human nature.

Among the folk-tales are many of the realistic type that are most serviceable. Like the folk fairy-tales they have that mysteriously but truly universal appeal, which makes them childlike, though originally they were not made for children. They are those comic and realistic tales which may originally have been coarse, but which have been refined by years and winnowed by use until they have taken on a form and value like those of some piece of ancient peasant hand-work—they are simple, genuine, homely art. Such are Kluge Else, Hans in Luck, Great Claus and Little Claus, The Three Sillies and all the delightful company of noodles, and the great family of plain folks with their homely affairs.

Of course, the great classic of the realistic method suited for children is Robinson Crusoe. From the days of Rousseau who designated it as the one book to be given to his ideally educated child, teachers have appreciated its value. Indeed, a very curious, but not unnatural, thing has happened, in the fact that this book has been so long and closely associated with children that it has come to be considered a sort of nursery classic, a wonder-tale composed for infants, by hosts of people who have no idea that it is in reality a masterly realistic novel and a profoundly philosophical culture-document—an epoch-making piece of art. Fortunately, it is easy to prepare it for the children; it is largely a matter of leaving out the reflective passages, and of translating into modern English the very few phrases and turns of expression now obsolete. One would deplore the reduction of the story for any purpose to mere babble—to words of one syllable, or any other form that destroys the flavor of Defoe's convincing style. It is easy to arrange the experiences so that the story serves the purposes of a cycle—a single experience constituting a portion which may be treated as a complete thing; for example, the making of the baskets, the construction of the pots, the saving of the seed.

Robinson Crusoe is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing, or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists. The art and the charm of Robinson Crusoe, and the secret of its literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism—a realism not so much of material as of method—to hold and convince us. A part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm, judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of Crusoe's successes. Oh, it is a great and convincing book! How great and how convincing one may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "Robinsons," taking their inspiration from Defoe's book, that really survives—the Swiss Family Robinson, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance; yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. That a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of interest, which is also for children the essential interest of Robinson Crusoe—the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat and bread—is the romance that is forever fresh and thrilling.

The exceedingly thoroughgoing realism of the method (notice, not the large frame-work, which is sufficiently romantic) of Robinson Crusoe would suggest at once that it might profitably be accompanied by some bits of literature that would throw a more romantic and idealistic coloring upon the primitive craftsman and his craft, and upon the experiences of voyager and colonist. Such would be Bret Harte's Columbus, Mrs. Hemans' The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, Marvell's Bermudas (with a few difficult lines omitted). Longfellow's Jasper Becerra, the twenty-third Psalm, and several chapters from Treasure Island. Every teacher could add other titles.

The older children—those of the seventh and eighth grades—may profitably read in school, for the sake of the intellectual experience, a classic detective story or a story whose plot and evolution present an almost purely intellectual problem. It is true that the air of intellectual acumen that pervades most of these stories is specious, and that they are in reality, and as a rule, shallow and unlogical pieces of reasoning. But it takes an older and more expert person to see this for himself. The teacher should try to qualify his children for judging a good story of this kind, and save them, if possible, from the detective-story habit, which wastes much good time and fills a child's mind with very cheap problems. But if he choose a good story of this kind for reading with his class, he may help to set their minds going in that region where the imagination must ally itself with logic and with a reasoned and inevitable progress of events. Properly channeled, this is a most valuable experience, both from the purely mental and from the literary points of view. After all, the best detective story in English is Poe's The Gold Bug. There is, of course, that element in Treasure Island, but, being there so interwoven with the romantic and adventurous details of that delectable tale, it is not likely to yield for the children that peculiar bit of training which they might get from the more unmixed intellectuality and more obvious realism of The Gold Bug.

It is difficult to know what to say, and where to say it, concerning Don Quixote. That triumphant book is assuredly a masterpiece of the realistic method. It came as an antidote and tonic, helping to restore health and sanity to a romance-sick world, and it ought to have a place in the discipline of certain kinds of young people. But it cannot be said that this place is always within the elementary period, unless a certain grade or certain children have had a peculiar experience and can be said to need it. If the grade has had the King Arthur stories of Malory or Tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they can very certainly be said to need Don Quixote—always, of course, shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which process—such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its unity—it suffers less than any other story in the world. We should be quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of this peculiar kind of realism—that which constitutes itself a satire and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. Nothing is more deadening and more commonplace than this peculiar form of wit, when it becomes a habit or offers itself in a mass. But the peculiar vitality and richness of Don Quixote lifts it far above the level of parody, constituting it a magnificent original piece of art in itself. However, the whole question must be left open. It may be that not until he is far along in the secondary school or in college is the scholar suffering for Don Quixote, or capable of appreciating it.

Among the older children the note of realism and wit may be sounded in a wisely chosen essay. Of course, they are not ready for the indirect and allusive manner, nor for the lyric egoism, of the pure literary essay. But there are essays of Lamb's, a very few of Steele's, some of Sidney Smith's, some of the more literary of Burroughs' nature-studies, bits of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dudley Warner, that are ideal for them.

Shall we sum up by saying that, on the whole, we find the romantic and fanciful stories best suited in form and spirit to the elementary children; since realistic stories that are really good art, are, as a rule, too mature and too difficult for the children, and realistic stories of the juvenile type are not good enough either in form or in content to justify long class study? However, certain distinctive and desirable results may be expected from specimens interwoven here and there of that kind of story which represents real life, which uses events both possible and probable, and which handles its material by the method of realistic detail. In the earliest years these may be secured by the reading of well-chosen little stories of modern children—indeed, of any modern material, provided it be simple enough—and by the teaching of verses which reflect aspects of actual life—human life or nature. In the third or fourth grade Robinson Crusoe forms a desirable basis for the year's work. It should always be accompanied by shorter bits of a more romantic and heroic type. Later in the elementary period—say in the sixth or seventh grade—the reasonable and practical element may be introduced in the form of a story of the detective kind—a story whose plot presents an intellectual problem, whose atmosphere and method make the impression of actual fact. And in the seventh and eighth grade these same purposes—that of exhibiting to the children actual human life as art sees it, that of bringing them into educational contact with the realistic method, that of counteracting any possible mental danger from too much romance and adventure—may be served by essays chosen on principles already many times suggested.