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Rh the friendly Teddy Bear she took with her to bed at night, and the story had absolutely no thrill of fear because it had been told with an emphasis on the comical rather than on the fearful. Similar in structure to The Three Bears is the Norse Three Billy-Goats, which belongs to the same class of delightful repetitive tales and in which the sequence of the tale is in the same three distinct steps.

II. The Animal Tale

The animal tale includes many of the most pleasing children's tales. Indeed some authorities would go so far as to trace all fairy tales back to some ancestor of an animal tale; and in many cases this certainly can be done just as we trace Three Bears back to Scrapefoot. The animal tale is either an old beast tale, such as Scrapefoot or Old Sultan; or a fairy tale which is an elaborated development of a fable, such as The Country Mouse and the City Mouse or the tales of Reynard the Fox or Grimm's The King of the Birds, and The Sparrow and His Four Children; or it is a purely imaginary creation, such as Kipling's The Elephant's Child or Andersen's The Bronze Pig.

The beast tale is a very old form which was a story of some successful primitive hunt or of some primitive man's experience with animals in which he looked up to the beast as a brother superior to himself in strength, courage, endurance, swiftness, keen scent,