Page:The art of story-telling, with nearly half a hundred stories, y Julia Darrow Cowles .. (IA artofstorytellin00cowl).pdf/124

 sense of atmosphere must come from the personality of the teller. That is why there is such a variety of charm in hearing the same story told by different persons. This sense of atmosphere is created by the story-teller's losing herself wholly in the story. She completely absorbs the story, its setting, its characters, its ideals, and when she gives it forth again, it takes op something of herself. This cannot be the case if the story is told as something assumed, external, or borrowed. In the latter, no matter how good the technique, the art is lost. Perhaps this point, which is most essential to artistic story-telling, may be more deeply impressed by a concrete example:

The story-lovers of one of our large cities recently had the pleasure of listening to two well-known story-tellers, each giving an hour with Uncle Remus. Only a few days elapsed between the two presentations. In the first instance the story-teller had scarcely more than commenced when we felt that we were sitting in Uncle Remus' cabin, away down South, listening to the adventures of Brer Wolf, Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit, told by the old man who loved them as his own brothers of the woods. We were the little boy, to