ildren's experiences are and should be
pretty much continuous flows of more or less equally important episodes.
Their stories should follow their experiences. They should have no
climaxes, no sense of completion. The episodes should be put together
more like a string of beads than like an organic whole. Almost any
section of a child's experience related in simple chronological
sequence makes a satisfactory story.

This can be pressed even further. There is another kind of relationship
by which little children interpret their environment. It is the early
manifestation of the associational process which in our adult life so
largely crowds out the sensory and motor appreciation of the world. It
runs way back to the baby's pleasure in recognizing things, certainly
long before the period of articulate questions. We all retain vestiges
of this childlike pleasure in our joyful greeting of a foreign word that
is understood or in any new application of an old thought or design. As
a child acquires a few words he adds the pleasure of naming,--an
extension of the pleasure of recognition. This again develops into the
joy of enumerating objects which are grouped together in some close
association, usually physical juxtaposition. For instance a two-or
three-year-old likes to have every article he ate for breakfast
rehearsed or to have every member of the family named at each episode
in a story which concerns the group! Earlier he likes to have his five
little toes checked off as pigs or merely numbered. This is closely tied
up with the child's pattern sense which we shall discuss at length under
"Form." Now the pleasure of enumeration, like that of a refrain, is in
part at least a pleasure in muscle pattern. My two-year-old daughter
composed a song which well illustrates the fascination of enumeration.
The refrain "Tick-tock" was borrowed from a song which had been sung to
her.

"Tick-tock
Marni's nose,
Tick-tock
Marni's eyes,
Tick-tock
Marni's mouth,
Tick-tock
Marni's teeth,
Tick-tock
Marni's chin,
Tick-tock
Marni's romper,
Tick-tock
Marni's stockings,
Tick-tock
Marni's shoes," etc., etc.

This she sang day after day, enumerating such groups as her clothes, the
objects on the mantel and her toys. Walt Whitman has given us glorified
enumerations of the most astounding vitality. If some one would only
pile up equally vigorous o