t and to preserve unity, but where a full-fledged
short-story which is structurally complete, has developed. A fine
accumulative tale belonging to this second class is the Cossack _Straw
Ox_, which has been described under "The Short-Story." Here we have a
single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then
unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot,
something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy
animals to watch them perform in the unwinding.

_The Three Bears_ illustrates the third class of repetitive story,
where there is repetition and variation. Here the iteration and
parallelism have interest like the refrain of a song, and the
technique of the story is like that of _The Merchant of Venice_. This
is the ideal fairy story for the little child. It is unique in that it
is the only instance in which a tale written by an author has become a
folk-tale. It was written by Southey, and appeared in _The Doctor_, in
London, in 1837. Southey may have used as his source, _Scrapefoot_,
which Joseph Jacobs has discovered for us, or he may have used _Snow
White_, which contains the episode of the chairs. Southey has given to
the world a nursery classic which should be retained in its purity of
form. The manner of the Folk, in substituting for the little old woman
of Southey's tale, Goldilocks, and the difference that it effects in
the tale, proves the greater interest children naturally feel in the
tale with a child. Similarly, in telling _The Story of Midas_ to an
audience of eager little people, one naturally takes the fine old myth
from Ovid as Bulfinch gives it, and puts into it the Marigold of
Hawthorne's creation. And after knowing Marigold, no child likes the
story without her. Silver hair is another substitute for the little
Old Woman in _The Three Bears_. The very little child's reception to
_Three Bears_ will depend largely on the previous experience with
bears and on the attitude of the person telling the story. A little
girl who was listening to _The Three Bears_ for the first time, as she
heard how the Three Bears stood looking out of their upstairs window
after Goldilocks running across the wood, said, "Why didn't Goldilocks
lie down beside the Baby Bear?" To her the Bear was associated with
the friendly Teddy Bear she took with her to bed at night, and the
story had absolutely no thrill of fear because it had been told with
an emphasis on the comical rather than on