l, or else subject every new story to the judgment of an authority
in the line dealt with. This is not easy for the teacher at a distance
from the great libraries, and for those who have access to well-equipped
libraries it is a matter of time and thought.

It does not so greatly trouble the teacher who uses the nature story as a
story, rather than as a text-book, for she will not be so keenly attracted
toward the books prepared with a didactic purpose. She will find a good
gift for the child in nature stories which are stories, over and above any
stimulus to his curiosity about fact. That good gift is a certain
possession of all good fiction.

One of the best things good fiction does for any of us is to broaden our
comprehension of other lots than our own. The average man or woman has
little opportunity actually to live more than one kind of life. The
chances of birth, occupation, family ties, determine for most of us a line
of experience not very inclusive and but little varied; and this is a
natural barrier to our complete understanding of others, whose life-line
is set at a different angle. It is not possible wholly to sympathise with
emotions engendered by experience which one has never had. Yet we all long
to be broad in sympathy and inclusive in appreciation; we long, greatly,
to know the experience of others. This yearning is probably one of the
good but misconceived appetites so injudiciously fed by the gossip of the
daily press. There is a hope, in the reader, of getting for the moment
into the lives of people who move in wholly different sets of
circumstances. But the relation of dry facts in newspapers, however tinged
with journalistic colour, helps very little to enter such other life. The
entrance has to be by the door of the imagination, and the journalist is
rarely able to open it for us. But there is a genius who can open it. The
author who can write fiction of the right sort can do it; his is the gift
of seeing inner realities, and of showing them to those who cannot see
them for themselves. Sharing the imaginative vision of the story-writer,
we can truly follow out many other roads of life than our own. The girl on
a lone country farm is made to understand how a girl in a city
sweating-den feels and lives; the London exquisite realises the life of a
Californian ranchman; royalty and tenement dwellers become acquainted,
through the power of the imagination working on experience shown in the
light of a