her discourse with kisses!  Her dull, conventional, grown-up hearers bent a little forward in their seats, perhaps, and compelled by her magic power laughed and cried in the right places; but their eyes never shone with that starry lustre that we see in the eyes of happy children,—­a lustre that is dimmed, alas, in after years.  Their eyes still see visions, but the “shadows of the prison house” have fallen about us, and the things which we have seen we “now can see no more!”

If you chance to be the Person with a Story, you sit like a queen on her throne surrounded by her loyal subjects; or like an unworthy sun with a group of flowers turning their faces towards you.  Inspired by breathless attention, you try ardently to do your very best.  It seems to you that you could never endure a total failure, and you hardly see how you could bear, with any sort of equanimity, even the vacant gaze or restless movement that would bespeak a vagrant interest.  If you are a novice, perhaps the frightful idea crosses your mind, “What if one of these children should slip out of the room?” Or, still more tragic possibility, suppose they should look you in the eye and remark with the terrible candor of infancy, “We do not like this story!” But no; you are more fortunate.  The tale is told, and you are greeted with sighs of satisfaction and with the instantaneous request, “Tell it again!” That is the encore of the Story-Teller,—­“Tell it again!  No, not another story; the same one over again, please!” for “what novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?” No royal accolade could be received with greater gratitude.  You endeavor to let humility wait upon self-respect; but when you discover that the children can scarcely be dragged from your fascinating presence, crying like Romeo for death rather than banishment, and that the next time you appear they make a wild dash from the upper regions, and precipitate themselves upon you with the full impact of their several weights “multiplied into their velocity,” you cannot help hugging yourself to think the good God has endowed you sufficiently to win the love and admiration of such keen observers and merciless little critics.

Now this charming little drama takes place in somebody’s nursery corner at twilight, when you are waiting for “that cheerful tocsin of the soul, the dinner-bell,” or around somebody’s fireside just before the children’s bedtime; but the same scene is enacted every few days in the presence of the fresh-hearted, childlike kindergartner, of all women the likeliest to find the secret of eternal youth.  She chooses the story as one of the vessels in which she shall carry the truth to her circle of little listeners, and you will never hear her say, like the needy knife-grinder, “Story?  God bless you, I have none to tell, sir!”