Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/233

Rh of fairy tales. It is Grimm's The Spider and the Flea, which as we have seen, is appealing in its simplicity; the Norse The Cock Who Fell into the Brewing Vat; and the Indian The Death and Burial of Poor Hen. The curious succession of incidents may have been invented once for all at some definite time, and from thence spread to all the world.

Johnny Cake and The Gingerbread Man also represent the second class of accumulative tale, but show a more definite plot; there is more story-stuff and a more decided introduction and conclusion. How Jack Went to Seek His Fortune also shows more plot. It contains a theme similar to that of The Bremen Town Musicians, which is distinctly a beast tale where the element of repetition remains to sustain the interest and to preserve unity, but where a full-fledged short-story which is structurally complete, has developed. A fine accumulative tale belonging to this second class is the Cossack Straw Ox, which has been described under "The Short-Story." Here we have a single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot, something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy animals to watch them perform in the unwinding.

The Three Bears illustrates the third class of repetitive story, where there is repetition and variation. Here the iteration and parallelism have interest like the refrain of a song, and the technique of the story is