oral presentation and discussion it would be impossible to hold strictly to the original. The teacher's own language and conception of the story will press in to simplify and clarify the meaning. No one holds strictly to a literary style in telling a story. Conversational ideas and original momentary impulses of thought demand their own forms of utterance. And yet it is well to appropriate the style and expression of the writer so as to accustom the children to the best forms. A few very apt and forcible sentences will be found in any good author which the teacher will naturally employ.

But the teacher must have freedom. When he has once thoroughly appropriated the story he must give vent to his own spontaneity and power. Later, when the children come to read these stories, they will enjoy them in their full literary form.

4. The power of clear and interesting presentation of a story is one of the chief professional acquisitions of a good primary teacher. It involves many things besides language, including liveliness of manner, gesture, facial expression, action, dramatic impersonation, skill in blackboard illustration, good humor and tact in working with children, a strong imagination, and a real appreciation for the literature adapted to children.

Perhaps the fundamental need is simplicity and clearness of thought and language combined with a pleasing and attractive manner. Vague and incomprehensible thoughts and ideas are all out of place. The teacher should be strict with himself in this matter, and while reading and mastering the story, should use compulsion upon himself to arrive at an unmistakable clearness of thought. The objects, buildings, palaces, woods, caves, animals, persons, and places should be sharply imaged by the imagination; the feelings and passions of the actors should be keenly realized. Often a vague and uncertain conception needs to be scanned, the passage reread, and the notion framed into clearness. In describing the palace of the sleeping beauty, begirt with woods, the sentinels standing statuelike at the portal, the lords and ladies at their employments, the teacher should think out the entrance way, hall, rooms, and persons of the palace so clearly that his thought and language will not stumble over uncertainties. Transparent clearness and directness of thought are the result of effort and circumspection. They are well worth the pains required to gain them. A teacher who thinks clearly will generate clear habits of thought in children.

The power of interesting narrative and description is not easily explained. It is a thing not readily analyzed into its elements. Perhaps the best way to find out what it is may be discovered by reading the great story-tellers, such as Macaulay, Irving, Kingsley, De Foe, Hawthorne, Homer, Plutarch, Scott, and Dickens. Novelists like George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Cooper, Scott, and Dickens, possess this secret also, and even some of the historians, as Herodotus, Fiske, Green, Parkman, Motley, and others. It is not so important that a teacher should give a cold analysis of their qualities as that he should fall insensibly into the vivid and realistic style of the best story-tellers. One who has read Pyle's Robin Hood stories until they are familiar will, to a considerable extent, appropriate his fertile and happy Old-English style, the sturdy English spirit of bold Robin, his playful humor, and his apt utterance of homely truths.

There are certain qualities that stand out prominently in the good story-tellers. They are simple and concrete in their descriptions, they deal very little in general, vague statements or abstractions, they hold closely to the persons of the story in the midst of interesting surroundings, they are profuse in the use of distinct figures of speech, appealing to the fancy or imagination. They often have a humorous vein which gives infinite enjoyment and spreads a happy charity throughout the world.

The art of graphic illustration on the blackboard is in almost constant demand in oral work. Even rude and untechnical sketches by teachers who have no acquired skill in artistic drawing are of the greatest value in giving a quick and accurate perception of places, buildings, persons, and surrounding conditions of a story or action. The map of Crusoe's island, the drawings to represent his tent, cave, boat, country residence, fortifications, dress, utensils, and battles are natural and simple modes of realizing clearly his labors and adventures. They save much verbal description and circumlocution. The teacher needs to acquire absolute boldness and freedom in using such illustrative devices. The children will, of course, catch this spirit, as they are by nature inclined to use drawing as a mode of expression.

A similar freedom in the teacher is necessary in the use of bodily action, gesture, and facial expression in story-telling. The teacher needs to become natural, childlike, and mobile in these things; for children are naturally much given to such demonstrations in the expression of their thought. Little girls of three and four years in the home, when free from self-consciousness, are marvellously and delightfully expressive by means of eyes, gestures, hands, and arms and whole bodily attitudes. Why should not this naive expressiveness be gently fostered in the school? Indeed it is, and in many schools the little ones are as happy and whole-souled and spontaneous in their modes of expression as we have suggested.

Dramatization, if cultivated, extends a teacher's gamut of expressiveness. Our inability or slowness to respond to this suggestion is a sign of a certain narrowness or cramp in our culture and training. In Normal schools where young teachers are trained in the art of reading, the dramatic instinct should be strongly developed. The power to other one's self in dramatic action, to assume and impersonate a variety of characters, is a real expression and enlargement of the personality. It demands sympathy and feeling as well as intellectual insight. The study and reading of the great dramatists, the seeing of good plays, amateur efforts in this direction, the frequent oral reading of Shakespeare, Dickens, and other dramatists and novelists will cultivate and enlarge the teacher's power in this worthy and wholesome art.

The use of good pictures is also an important means of adding to the beauty and clearness of stories. The pictures of Indian life in "Hiawatha," the illustrated editions of "Robinson Crusoe," the copies of ancient works of art in some editions of the Greek myths, Howard Pyle's illustrated "Robin Hood," and other books of this character add greatly to the vividness of ideas. Such pictures should be handled with care, not distributed promiscuously among the children while the lesson is going on. The teacher needs to study a picture, and discuss it intelligently with the children, asking questions which bring out its representative qualities.

It is evident the skilful oral presentation of a story calls out no small degree of clear knowledge, force of language, illustrative device, dramatic instinct, and a freedom and versatility of action both mental and physical.

5. A clear outline of leading points in a story is a source of strength to the teacher and the basis later of good reproductive work by the children. The short stories in the first grade hardly need a formal outline, and even in second grade the sequence of ideas in a story is often so simple and easy that outlines of leading topics may not be needed. But in third and fourth grade it is well in the preliminary study and mastery of a story to divide it up into clearly marked segments, with a distinctive title for