Page:The art of story-telling, with nearly half a hundred stories, y Julia Darrow Cowles .. (IA artofstorytellin00cowl).pdf/53

 *ness than an interested audience of one hundred.

A teacher presenting a story to her own class of pupils will not, of course, have so many difficulties to overcome. She and the children are on a familiar footing; she talks to them every day; she knows the number and responsiveness of her audience, the size of the room, the carrying power of her own voice. She is scarcely conscious that these factors enter into the success of story-telling. But when a story-teller addresses an unknown audience, these factors assume unexpected importance.

I have in mind an early experience when a story hour was arranged at one of the branch libraries of a large city. I knew that the "fifty-seven varieties" of childhood were accustomed to assemble there and that the room was not large, but I was not prepared to find two hundred children compressed within little more than two hundred square feet of space. My natural voice proved wholly inadequate. I began, but saw at once that the children at the farther end of the room could not hear, and I stopped. Taking a more central position, I found an entirely