If you find the attention of the children wandering, you can frequently win it gently back by showing some object illustrative of your story, by drawing a hasty sketch on a blackboard, or by questions to the children.  You sometimes receive more answers than you bargained for; sometimes these answers will be confounded with the real facts; and sometimes they will fall very wide of the mark.

I was once telling the exciting tale of the Shepherd’s Child lost in the mountains, and of the sagacious dog who finally found him.  When I reached the thrilling episode of the search, I followed the dog as he started from the shepherd’s hut with the bit of breakfast for his little master.  The shepherd sees the faithful creature, and seized by a sudden inspiration follows in his path.  Up, up the mountain sides they climb, the father full of hope, the mother trembling with fear.  The dog rushes ahead, quite out of sight; the anxious villagers press forward in hot pursuit.  The situation grows more and more intense; they round a little point of rocks, and there, under the shadow of a great gray crag, they find—­

“What do you suppose they found?”

“Fi’ cents!!” shouted Benny in a transport of excitement.  “Bet Yer they found Fi’ cents!!”

You would imagine that such a preposterous idea could not find favor in any sane community; but so altogether seductive a guess did this appear to be, that a chorus of “Fi’ cents!” “Fi’ cents!” sounded on every side; and when the tumult was hushed, the discovery of an ordinary flesh and blood child fell like an anti-climax on a public thoroughly in love with its own incongruities.  Let the psychologist explain Benny’s mental processes; we prefer to leave them undisturbed and unclassified.

If you have no children of your own, dear Person with a Story, go into the highways and by-ways and gather together the little ones whose mothers’ lips are dumb; sealed by dull poverty, hard work, and constant life in atmospheres where graceful fancies are blighted as soon as they are born.  There is no fireside, and no chimney corner in those crowded tenements.  There is no silver-haired grandsire full of years and wisdom, with memory that runs back to the good old times that are no more.  There is no cheerful grandame with pocket full of goodies and a store of dear old reminiscences all beginning with that enchanting phrase, “When I was a little girl.”

Brighten these sordid lives a little with your pretty thoughts, your lovely imaginations, your tender pictures.  Speak to them simply, for their minds grope feebly in the dim twilight of their restricted lives.  The old, old stories will do; stories of love and heroism and sacrifice; of faith and courage and fidelity.  Kindle in tired hearts a gentler thought of life; open the eyes that see not and the ears that hear not; interpret to them something of the beauty that has been revealed to you.  You do not need talent, only sympathy, “the one poor word that includes all our best insight and our best love.”