Humor is the charm, too, of Andersen’s Snow Man.Here the child can identify himself with the Dog and thereby join in the sport which the Dog makes at the Snow Man’s expense, just as if he himself were enlightening the Snow Man about the Sun, the Moon, and the Stove.  There is most delightful humor in The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership, where the Cat has the face to play upon the credulity of the poor housekeeper Mouse, who always “stayed at home and did not go out into the daytime.”  Returning home from his ventures abroad he named the first kitten Top-Off, the second one Half-Out, and the third one All-Out; while instead of having attended the christening of each, as he pretended, he secretly had been visiting the jar of fat he had placed for safe-keeping in the church.

Poetic justice.  Emotional satisfaction and moral satisfaction based on emotional instinct appeal to the child.  He pities the plight of the animals in the Bremen Town Musicians, and he wants them to find a refuge, a safe home.  He is glad that the robbers are chased out, his sense of right and wrong is satisfied.  Poetic justice suits him.  This is one reason why fairy tales make a more definite impression often than life—­because in the tale the retribution follows the act so swiftly that the child may see it, while in life “the mills of the gods grind slowly,” and even the adult who looks cannot see them grind.  The child wants Cinderella to gain the reward for her goodness; and he wishes the worthy Shoemaker and his Wife, in the Elves and the Shoemaker, to get the riches their industry deserves.

The imaginative.  Fairy tales satisfy the activity of the child’s imagination and stimulate his fancy.  Some beautiful spring day, perhaps, after he has enjoyed an excursion to a field or meadow or wood, he will want to follow Andersen’s Thumbelina in her travels.  He will follow her as she floats on a lily pad, escapes a frog of a husband, rides on a butterfly, lives in the house of a field-mouse, escapes a mole of a husband, and then rides on the back of a friendly swallow to reach the south land and to become queen of the flowers.  Here there is much play of fancy.  But even when the episodes are homely and the situations familiar, as in Little Red Hen, the act of seeing them as distinct images and of following them with interest feeds the imagination.  For while the elements are familiar, the combination is unusual; and this nourishes the child’s ability to remove from the usual situation, which is the essential element in all originality.  By entering into the life of the characters and identifying himself with them, he develops a large sympathy and a sense of power, he gains insight into life, and a care for the interests of the world.  Thus imagination grows “in flexibility, in scope, and in sympathy, till the life which the individual lives is informed with the life of nature and