Johnny Cake and The Gingerbread Man also represent the second class of accumulative tale, but show a more definite plot; there is more story-stuff and a more decided introduction and conclusion. How Jack Went to Seek His Fortune also shows more plot.  It contains a theme similar to that of The Bremen Town Musicians, which is distinctly a beast tale where the element of repetition remains to sustain the interest and to preserve unity, but where a full-fledged short-story which is structurally complete, has developed.  A fine accumulative tale belonging to this second class is the Cossack Straw Ox, which has been described under “The Short-Story.”  Here we have a single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot, something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy animals to watch them perform in the unwinding.

The Three Bears illustrates the third class of repetitive story, where there is repetition and variation.  Here the iteration and parallelism have interest like the refrain of a song, and the technique of the story is like that of The Merchant of Venice.  This is the ideal fairy story for the little child.  It is unique in that it is the only instance in which a tale written by an author has become a folk-tale.  It was written by Southey, and appeared in The Doctor, in London, in 1837.  Southey may have used as his source, Scrapefoot, which Joseph Jacobs has discovered for us, or he may have used Snow White, which contains the episode of the chairs.  Southey has given to the world a nursery classic which should be retained in its purity of form.  The manner of the Folk, in substituting for the little old woman of Southey’s tale, Goldilocks, and the difference that it effects in the tale, proves the greater interest children naturally feel in the tale with a child.  Similarly, in telling The Story of Midas to an audience of eager little people, one naturally takes the fine old myth from Ovid as Bulfinch gives it, and puts into it the Marigold of Hawthorne’s creation.  And after knowing Marigold, no child likes the story without her.  Silver hair is another substitute for the little Old Woman in The Three Bears.  The very little child’s reception to Three Bears will depend largely on the previous experience with bears and on the attitude of the person telling the story.  A little girl who was listening to The Three Bears for the first time, as she heard how the Three Bears stood looking out of their upstairs window after Goldilocks running across the wood, said, “Why didn’t Goldilocks lie down beside the Baby Bear?” To her the Bear was associated with the friendly Teddy Bear she took with her to bed at night, and the story had absolutely no thrill of fear because it had been told with an emphasis on the comical rather than on the fearful.  Similar in structure to The Three Bears is the Norse Three Billy-Goats, which belongs to the same class of delightful repetitive tales and in which the sequence of the tale is in the same three distinct steps.