the fearful. Similar in
structure to _The Three Bears_ is the Norse _Three Billy-Goats_, which
belongs to the same class of delightful repetitive tales and in which
the sequence of the tale is in the same three distinct steps.

II. The Animal Tale

The animal tale includes many of the most pleasing children's tales.
Indeed some authorities would go so far as to trace all fairy tales
back to some ancestor of an animal tale; and in many cases this
certainly can be done just as we trace _Three Bears_ back to
_Scrapefoot_. The animal tale is either an old beast tale, such as
_Scrapefoot_ or _Old Sultan_; or a fairy tale which is an elaborated
development of a fable, such as _The Country Mouse and the City Mouse_
or the tales of _Reynard the Fox_ or Grimm's _The King of the Birds_,
and _The Sparrow and His Four Children_; or it is a purely imaginary
creation, such as Kipling's _The Elephant's Child_ or Andersen's _The
Bronze Pig_.

The beast tale is a very old form which was a story of some successful
primitive hunt or of some primitive man's experience with animals in
which he looked up to the beast as a brother superior to himself in
strength, courage, endurance, swiftness, keen scent, vision, or
cunning. Later, in more civilized society, when men became interested
in problems of conduct, animals were introduced to point the moral of
the tale, and we have the fable. The fable resulted when a truth was
stated in concrete story form. When this truth was in gnomic form,
stated in general terms, it became compressed into the proverb. The
fable was brief, intense, and concerned with the distinguishing
characteristics of the animal characters, who were endowed with human
traits. Such were the _Fables of AEsop_. Then followed the beast epic,
such as _Reynard the Fox_, in which the personality of the animals
became less prominent and the animal characters became types of
humanity. Later, the beast tale took the form of narratives of
hunters, where the interest centered in the excitement of the hunt and
in the victory of the hunter. With the thirst for universal knowledge
in the days following Bacon there gradually grew a desire to learn
also about animals. Then followed animal anecdotes, the result of
observation and imagination, often regarding the mental processes of
animals. With the growth of the scientific spirit the interest in
natural history developed. The modern animal story since 1850 has a
basis of natural scienc