It is not hard to see why these qualities appeal to a child.  The first is the prime characteristic of all good stories,—­“stories as is stories”; the child’s demand for it but bears witness to the fact that his instinctive taste is often better than the taste he later develops under artificial culture.  The second is a matter of common-sense.  How could the imagination create new worlds, save out of the material of the old?  To offer strange images is to confuse the mind and dull the interest; to offer familiar ones “with a difference” is to pique the interest and engage the mind.

The charm of repetition, to children, is a more complex matter; there are undoubtedly a good many elements entering into it, hard to trace in analysis.  But one or two of the more obvious may be seized and brought to view.  The first is the subtle flattery of an unexpected sense of mastery.  When the child-mind, following with toilful alertness a new train of thought, comes suddenly on a familiar epithet or expression, I fancy it is with much the same sense of satisfaction that we older people feel when in the midst of a long programme of new music the orchestra strikes into something we have heard before,—­Handel, maybe, or one of the more familiar Beethoven sonatas.  “I know that!  I have heard that before!” we think, triumphant, and settle down to enjoyment without effort.  So it is, probably, with the “middle-sized” articles of the bears’ house and the “and I sha’n’t get home to-night” of the old woman.  Each recurrence deepens the note of familiarity, tickles the primitive sense of humour, and eases the strain of attention.

When the repetition is cumulative, like the extreme instance of The House that Jack Built, I have a notion that the joy of the child is the pleasure of intellectual gymnastics, not too hard for fun, but not too easy for excitement.  There is a deal of fun to be got out of purely intellectual processes, and childhood is not too soon for the rudiments of such fun to show.  The delight the healthy adult mind takes in working out a neat problem in geometry, the pleasure a musician finds in following the involutions of a fugue, are of the same type of satisfaction as the liking of children for cumulative stories.  Complexity and mass, arrived at by stages perfectly intelligible in themselves, mounting steadily from a starting-point of simplicity; then the same complexity and mass resolving itself as it were miraculously back into simplicity, this is an intellectual joy.  It does not differ materially, whether found in the study of counterpoint, at thirty, or in the story of the old woman and her pig, at five.  It is perfectly natural and wholesome, and it may perhaps be a more powerful developing force for the budding intellect than we are aware.

For these reasons let me urge you, when you are looking for stories to tell little children, to apply this threefold test as a kind of touchstone to their quality of fitness:  Are they full of action, in close natural sequence?  Are their images simple without being humdrum?  Are they repetitive?  The last quality is not an absolute requisite; but it is at least very often an attribute of a good child-story.