e rounded out by a clear
perception of the successive steps which lead up to the climax. One has,
so, the framework of the story. The next process is the filling in.

There must be many ways of going about this filling in. Doubtless many of
my readers, in the days when it was their pet ambition to make a good
recitation in school, evolved personally effective ways of doing it; for
it is, after all, the same thing as preparing a bit of history or a
recitation in literature. But for the consideration of those who find it
hard to gain mastery of fact without mastery of its stated form, I give my
own way. I have always used the childlike plan of talking it out.
Sometimes inaudibly, sometimes in loud and penetrating tones which arouse
the sympathetic curiosity of my family, I tell it over and over, to an
imaginary hearer. That hearer is as present to me, always has been, as
Stevenson's "friend of the children" who takes the part of the enemy in
their solitary games of war. His criticism (though he is a most composite
double-sexed creature who should not have a designating personal pronoun)
is all-revealing. For talking it out instantly brings to light the weak
spots in one's recollection. "What was it the little crocodile said?"
"Just how did the little pig get into his house?" "What was that link in
the chain of circumstances which brought the wily fox to confusion?" The
slightest cloud of uncertainty becomes obvious in a moment. And as obvious
becomes one's paucity of expression, one's week-kneed imagination, one's
imperfect assimilation of the spirit of the story. It is not a flattering
process.

But when these faults have been corrected by several attempts, the method
gives a confidence, a sense of sureness, which makes the real telling to a
real audience ready and spontaneously smooth. Scarcely an epithet or a
sentence comes out as it was in the preliminary telling; but epithets and
sentences in sufficiency do come; the beauty of this method is that it
brings freedom instead of bondage.

A valuable exception to the rule against memorising must be noted here.
Especially beautiful and indicative phrases of the original should be
retained, and even whole passages, where they are identified with the
beauty of the tale. And in stories like _The Three Bears_ or _Red Riding
Hood_ the exact phraseology of the conversation as given in familiar
versions should be preserved; it is in a way sacred, a classic, and not to
be altere