Page:Stories and story-telling (1915).djvu/32

 You may, by the way, study the story in either of two places: a lovely natural spot, where under the lure of century-wisdomed tree, or amid sweet smells, or flash of birds, or beckonings of shadows, you may catch the glamour of the old-world setting in the stories; or in a city street swarming with children, old-faced before their time. The environment in the second studio, far from destroying your effort to grasp the wonder-world of the story, will make special appeal to you. Here you will feel divine compulsion to make child life more abundant: to bring from story land bright hosts of gay fairies and gentle children and brave knights and real as well as fiction heroes as saving company for the little worldlings, to make them chuckle with a child's hearty glee at trick of goblin or sprite, or quake with delicious tremor at the tread of the terrible giant. You will find that the "toughest," most crabbed city urchin will succumb to the witchery of the fairy folk, to the charm of beauty and the fair play of kindness and honesty.

The child's world reflected in the story is the right of the child in the city tenement district, and society's hope for him. It is, by the way, no less the right of the rich child and no less society's hope for him.

After you have let the story take possession of