teacher whom I recently listened to, and who will laugh if she recognises her blunder here, offers a good “bad example” in this particular.  She said to an attentive audience of students that she had at last, with much difficulty, brought herself to the point where she could forget herself in her story:  where she could, for instance, hop, like the fox, when she told the story of the “sour grapes.”  She said, “It was hard at first, but now it is a matter of course; and the children do it too, when they tell the story.”  That was the pity!  I saw the illustration myself a little later.  The child who played fox began with a story:  he said, “Once there was an old fox, and he saw some grapes”; then the child walked to the other side of the room, and looked at an imaginary vine, and said, “He wanted some; he thought they would taste good, so he jumped for them”; at this-point the child did jump, like his role; then he continued with his story, “but he couldn’t get them.”  And so he proceeded, with a constant alternation of narrative and dramatisation which was enough to make one dizzy.

The trouble in such work is, plainly, a lack of discriminating analysis.  Telling a story necessarily implies non-identification of the teller with the event; he relates what occurs or occurred, outside of his circle of consciousness.  Acting a play necessarily implies identification of the actor with the event; he presents to you a picture of the thing, in himself.  It is a difference wide and clear, and the least failure to recognise it confuses the audience and injures both arts.

In the preceding instances of secondary uses of story-telling I have come some distance from the great point, the fundamental point, of the power of imitation in breeding good habit.  This power is less noticeably active in the dramatising than in simple retelling; in the listening and the retelling, it is dominant for good.  The child imitates what he hears you say and sees you do, and the way you say and do it, far more closely in the story-hour than in any lesson-period.  He is in a more absorbent state, as it were, because there is no preoccupation of effort.  Here is the great opportunity of the cultured teacher; here is the appalling opportunity of the careless or ignorant teacher.  For the implications of the oral theory of teaching English are evident, concerning the immense importance of the teacher’s habit.  This is what it all comes to ultimately:  the teacher of young children must be a person who can speak English as it should be spoken,—­purely, clearly, pleasantly, and with force.

It is a hard ideal to live up to, but it is a valuable ideal to try to live up to.  And one of the best chances to work toward attainment is in telling stories, for there you have definite material, which you can work into shape and practise on in private.  That practice ought to include conscious thought as to one’s general manner in the schoolroom, and intelligent effort to understand and improve one’s own voice.  I hope I shall not seem to assume the dignity of an authority which no personal taste can claim, if I beg a hearing for the following elements of manner and voice, which appeal to me as essential.  They will, probably, appear self-evident to my readers, yet they are often found wanting in the public school teacher; it is so much easier to say “what were good to do” than to do it!