nd. Your taste, though it coincides with
another's, can be quite as well questioned or commended; and the manner
of your telling will be subjected to trial by comparison, which, if not
always comfortable, is always helpful (_when met in the right spirit_).

Remember, the serious creative work you are to produce is to take the
form of a fable, fairy story, or humorous essay.

FOURTH STUDY

TO DEVELOP IMAGINATIVE VIGOR

In one of the great manufacturing towns of the Northwest there are some
twenty-five thousand girls employed in factories. The city permits
conditions of work hostile to the physical life of these girls. Civic
reform is trying to control these conditions. In time it doubtless will
succeed in doing so; meanwhile it makes efforts in other directions. It
establishes working girls' clubs. A class in literature in one of these
clubs enlisted the services of a comprehending young teacher, who kept
the girls interested for more than two years. A little girl from a bag
factory entered this class. She came to every meeting of the first year.
She did not join in the discussions nor ask questions nor evince unusual
intelligence or enjoyment, but she _came_ every night. The class began
its second year. The little girl from the bag factory was the first to
enroll. The teacher could not cover the surprise in her question, "Are
you coming into the class again?" The girl's breathless "Oh yes" sent
her to investigate the case. She went to the factory. She found the
child standing at a bench folding bags. Eight hours a day she folded
bags. A swing back on her right foot with the stuff of which the bag was
made grasped in her hands--a swing forward, and her hands brought the
edges of the stuff together evenly. Over and over a thousand times the
single motion repeated made up the girl's day. "It used to make me
tired," she said, simply. "But it doesn't any more?" "No, because now I
forget what I am doing sometimes. I have my book, you see. They let me
fasten it here." There it was--a paper copy of Shelley's poems. The
print was good; the teacher had seen to that. She had observed that
factory girls' eyes are not always very strong. The book was fastened to
the front of the desk. The child could catch a line from time to time
without interrupting her bag-folding. "But I know most of the poems we
have studied in class by heart." So she had to recall but a line, and
then off she would go through the windows of the stif