.

A positive and a negative injunction depend on this premise,--the
positive, cultivate your feeling, striving toward increasingly just
appreciation; the negative, never tell a story you do not feel.

Fortunately, the number and range of stories one can appreciate grow with
cultivation; but it is the part of wisdom not to step outside the range at
any stage of its growth.

I feel the more inclined to emphasise this caution because I once had a
rather embarrassing and pointed proof of its desirability,--which I relate
for the enlightening of the reader.

There is a certain nonsense tale which a friend used to tell with such
effect that her hearers became helpless with laughter, but which for some
reason never seemed funny to me. I could not laugh at it. But my friend
constantly urged me to use it, quoting her own success. At last, with much
curiosity and some trepidation, I included it in a programme before people
with whom I was so closely in sympathy that no chill was likely to emanate
from their side. I told the story as well as I knew how, putting into it
more genuine effort than most stories can claim. The audience smiled
politely, laughed gently once or twice, relapsed into the mildest of
amusement. The most one could say was that the story was not a hopeless
failure. I tried it again, after study, and yet again; but the audiences
were all alike. And in my heart I should have been startled if they had
behaved otherwise, for all the time I was telling it I was conscious in my
soul that it was a stupid story! At last I owned my defeat to myself, and
put the thing out of mind.

Some time afterward, I happened to take out the notes of the story, and
idly looked them over; and suddenly, I do not know how, I got the point of
view! The salt of the humour was all at once on my lips; I felt the tickle
of the pure folly of it; it _was_ funny.

The next afternoon I told the story to a hundred or so children and as
many mothers,--and the battle was won. Chuckles punctuated my periods;
helpless laughter ran like an under-current below my narrative; it was a
struggle for me to keep sober, myself. The nonsense tale had found its own
atmosphere.

Now of course I had known all along that the humour of the story emanated
from its very exaggeration, its absurdly illogical smoothness. But I had
not _felt_ it. I did not really "see the joke." And that was why I could
not tell the story. I undoubtedly impressed my own sense of i