Page:The art of story-telling, with nearly half a hundred stories, y Julia Darrow Cowles .. (IA artofstorytellin00cowl).pdf/55

 will soon relax the effort and become restless and indifferent.

If a child becomes inattentive, address your story to him for a time, and turn to him frequently afterward. Each child loves to feel that the story is being told to him. For this reason, the story and the children are the only things to be taken account of. The story should be told directly to the individual children, not to the mass of children.

At a recent story hour the children were grouped upon the left hand side of the large audience room, and the older people, of whom there were a goodly number, upon the right hand side. A small cousin of the story-teller—aged three—who had heard the stories until he could tell them himself, sat upon his grandfather's lap on the "grown-up" side of the room.

The story-teller devoted her attention to the children's side of the room exclusively. She began with the story of "Raggylug," by Ernest Thompson-Seton. The moment the story was finished, a small voice from the neglected side of the room demanded, "Now tell it to me!"

The incident is used to show that each