cleaves the
beanstalk, and as for Pharaoh, "Well, it's a good thing he's drowned,
for he was a bad man, wasn't he?" Death means nothing to children, as a
rule, except disappearance. When children can read for themselves, they
will take from their stories what suits their stage of development,
their standard of judgement, and we need not interfere, even though they
regard with perfect calm what seems gruesome to the adult.

As a valuable addition to the best-known fairy-tales, we may mention one
or two others: _Grannie's Wonderful Chair_ is a delightful set of
stories, full of charming pictures, though the writer, Frances Brown,
was born blind. Mrs. Ewing's stories for children, _The Brownies_, with
_Amelia and the Dwarfs_ and _Timothy's Shoes_, are inimitable, and her
_Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales_ are very good, but not for very young
children. Her other stories are certainly about children, but are, as a
rule, written for adults.

George Macdonald's stories are all too well known and too universally
beloved to need recommendation. But in telling them, _e.g._ "The
Princess and the Goblins" or "At the Back of the North Wind," the young
teacher must remember that they are beautiful allegories. Before she
ventures to tell them, the beginner should ponder well what the
poet--for these are prose poems--means, and who is represented by the
beautiful Great-great-grandmother always old and always young, or "North
Wind" who must sink the ship but is able to bear the cry from it,
because of the sound of a far-off song, which seems to swallow up all
fear and pain and to set the suffering "singing it with the rest."

_Water-Babies_ is a bridge between the fairy-tale of a child and equally
wonderful and beautiful fairy-tales of Nature, and it, too, is full of
meaning. If the teacher has gained this, the children will not lag
behind. It was a child of backward development, who, when she heard of
Mother Carey, "who made things make themselves," said, "Oh! I know who
that was, that was God."

Such stories must be spread out over many days of telling, but they gain
rather than lose from that, though for quite young children the stories
do require to be short and simple, and often repeated. If children get
plenty of these, the stage for longer stories is reached wonderfully
soon.

Pseudo-scientific stories, in which, for example, a drop of water
discusses evaporation and condensation, are not stories at all, but a
kind of mental mea