“Here’s a ball for baby, _Big_ and _soft_ and _round_.
Here’s the baby’s hammer, Oh, how he can _pound_.
Here’s the baby’s _music_, _Clapping_, _clapping_ so.
Here are baby’s soldiers Standing in a row--”
As the child grows beyond the age when Mother Goose and Finger Plays appeal to him, he still finds his greatest interest in those stories which stimulate his acquired sensory images. The mental operation of apperception described in the last chapter is so inclusive a process, covering, as it must of necessity, memory and perception, that it explains the appeal of the sense story to the mind of a child. Many of the stories quoted at the end of the chapter as being of universal interest to all children find their common points of interest in their sense pictures, so quickly grasped and so warmly welcomed by the child mind whose sense doors are always flung wide open.
It is to be questioned whether or not the story of “The Little Red Hen” would have been awarded such immortality if its heroine had been a plain _hen_ and not _red_. Having been dyed with the crimson pigment of the imagination, however, by some old-world story teller, she has taken her cheerful, cackling way through the streets of childhood, an undying, classic fowl of fiction because she is colored. So it is with Elizabeth Harrison’s wonderful allegory of “The Little Gray Grandmother.” She might have been described in the story as a spirit, a fairy, a mythical character who influenced for good the lives of Wilhelm, Beata and the others. But instead of _describing_ her invisibility--Miss Harrison _paints_ it, colors her story heroine with the shades of intangible things. She is a little _gray_ grandmother and her clothes are sea fog and her veil is of smoke. She is an animated part of the seashore home and is made of gray mist. What could be more artistic than the sense appeal of this story?
Why do children--all children--listen, gaping and ecstatic, to the account of the many and hazardous adventures of the Gingerbread Boy? Why do they beg to have the story told over again, even after they have heard it so many times that they know it by heart. Its universal popularity is not due to its folklore quality. Neither is it due to its plot and treatment, although these undoubtedly strengthen it. Its big appeal, however, is to the child’s sense of taste. The story arouses tasting images in the child’s mind, that are pleasurable and strong.