interest and
engage the mind.

The charm of repetition, to children, is a more complex matter; there are
undoubtedly a good many elements entering into it, hard to trace in
analysis. But one or two of the more obvious may be seized and brought to
view. The first is the subtle flattery of an unexpected sense of mastery.
When the child-mind, following with toilful alertness a new train of
thought, comes suddenly on a familiar epithet or expression, I fancy it is
with much the same sense of satisfaction that we older people feel when in
the midst of a long programme of new music the orchestra strikes into
something we have heard before,--Handel, maybe, or one of the more
familiar Beethoven sonatas. "I know that! I have heard that before!" we
think, triumphant, and settle down to enjoyment without effort. So it is,
probably, with the "middle-sized" articles of the bears' house and the
"and I sha'n't get home to-night" of the old woman. Each recurrence
deepens the note of familiarity, tickles the primitive sense of humour,
and eases the strain of attention.

When the repetition is cumulative, like the extreme instance of _The House
that Jack Built_, I have a notion that the joy of the child is the
pleasure of intellectual gymnastics, not too hard for fun, but not too
easy for excitement. There is a deal of fun to be got out of purely
intellectual processes, and childhood is not too soon for the rudiments
of such fun to show. The delight the healthy adult mind takes in working
out a neat problem in geometry, the pleasure a musician finds in following
the involutions of a fugue, are of the same type of satisfaction as the
liking of children for cumulative stories. Complexity and mass, arrived at
by stages perfectly intelligible in themselves, mounting steadily from a
starting-point of simplicity; then the same complexity and mass resolving
itself as it were miraculously back into simplicity, this is an
intellectual joy. It does not differ materially, whether found in the
study of counterpoint, at thirty, or in the story of the old woman and her
pig, at five. It is perfectly natural and wholesome, and it may perhaps be
a more powerful developing force for the budding intellect than we are
aware.

For these reasons let me urge you, when you are looking for stories to
tell little children, to apply this threefold test as a kind of touchstone
to their quality of fitness: Are they full of action, in close natural
sequence? Are t