When a kindergarten child, the most timid one of a group, on listening to the telling of The Bremen Town Musicians, at the description of the Donkey and the Dog coming to the Cat, sitting in the road with a face “dismal as three rainy Sundays,” chuckled with humor at the word “dismal,” it was not because she knew the meaning of the word or the significance of “three rainy Sundays,” but because the sounds of the words and the facial expression of the story-teller conveyed the emotional effect, which she sensed.

The connection between sound and action appears in Little Spider’s First Web:  The Fly said, “Then I will buzz”; the Bee said, “Then I will hum”; the Cricket said, “Then I will chirp”; the Ant said, “Then I will run to and fro”; the Butterfly said, “Then I will fly”; and the Bird said, “Then I will sing.”  The effect is produced here because the words selected are concrete ones which visualize.  Repetitive passages in the tales often contribute this effect of sound upon meaning, as we find in The Three Billy-Goats Gruff:  “Trip, trap; trip, trap! went the bridge as the youngest Billy-Goat Gruff came to cross the bridge.”  The sound of the words in this entire tale contributes largely to the meaning.  The Troll roared and said, “Now I’m coming to gobble you up!” Usually the bits of rhyme interspersed throughout the tales, illustrate this contribution of sound to meaning; as in the Three Pigs:—­

     Then I’ll huff,
     And I’ll puff,
     And I’ll blow your house in!

Especially is this the case in tales dignified by the cante-fable form; such as Grimm’s Cinderella:—­

     Rustle and shake yourself, dear tree,
     And silver and gold throw down to me!

Or in Little Two-Eyes:—­

     Little kid, bleat,
     I wish to eat!

Or in The Little Lamb and the Little Fish:—­

     Ah, my brother, in the wood
     A Iamb, now I must search for food!

The suggestive power of words to convey more than they mean, is produced, not only by the sounds contained in the words themselves, but also largely by the arrangement of the words and by the speech-tunes of the voice in speaking them.  Kipling’s Elephant’s Child is a living example of the suggestive power of words.  The “new, fine question” suggests that the Elephant’s Child had a habit of asking questions which had not been received as if they were fine.  “Wait-a-bit thorn-bush,” suggests the Kolokolo Bird sitting alone on the bush in placid quiet.  “And still I want to know what the crocodile has for dinner” implies that there had been enough spankings to have killed the curiosity, but contrary to what one would expect, it was living and active.  When Kolokolo Bird said with a mournful cry, “Go to the banks of the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River,” etc., the implication of mournful is, that there the Elephant’s Child would have a sorry time of it.  The expression, “dear families,” which occurs so often, is full of delightful irony and suggests the vigorous treatment, anything but dear, which had come to the Elephant’s Child from them.