“I have eaten my friend the mouse. I have eaten an old woman, and a man and a donkey, and the King and all his elephants. What is to hinder my eating you, too?”
Chicken Little bewails to every one she meets:
And in answer to the query “How do you know?” she assures her questioner:
“I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a bit of it fell upon my tail.”
In Maud Lindsay’s story of “The Little Gray Pony” there is a delightfully interpolated jingle that repeats itself and adds to itself in such fascinating fashion that children cannot resist saying with the story teller:
“Storekeeper! Storekeeper! I’ve come to you; My little gray pony has lost his shoe! And I want some coal the iron to heat, That the blacksmith may shoe my pony’s feet.”
“Now, I have apples and candy to sell, And more nice things than I can tell; But I’ve no coal the iron to heat, That the blacksmith may shoe your pony’s feet.”
Ever popular Little Half Chick with his happy-go-lucky, daring journey to Madrid compels children to tell his story as he “_hoppity kicks_” through his adventures. The Three Pigs with their three ever interesting fates help a child to do his own story telling. There is an exhaustless fund of folk lore to draw upon that has few words in its story construction, frequent and happy repetitions of those words, and inspiration for a child to make those words a part of his own vocabulary.
These bits of repeated phrasing in a story, scraps of incorporated lyrics and jingles and built-up cumulative paragraphs are like the beads that help to make the child’s necklace. On them he strings the thread of the story narrative, making it so thoroughly a part of his mental life that he is able to give it out again in the remembered words of the story. Long after the loved, “huffing and puffing” of the wolf in the story of the “Three Little Pigs” has become only a memory, a child uses the words, _furze_, _blazing_, _scramble_, _fortune_--and a hundred other words that came to him in this happy story connection and so into his every-day conversation.
The older child who has passed the nursery tale and folk lore turnstile in his story road finds help to a greater power in verbal expression by means of the beautifully written story, told in its original pure phrasing by the story teller and enriching him because of its wonderful English. A truly well-wrought story suffers often at the hands of the story teller. It isn’t necessary in telling such a story to bring it down to the plane of the children’s intelligence; rather we will bring the children up to its heights of beautiful imagery and mellow phrasing.