that appealed to the universal heart.  And because of this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a classic form and therefore have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form.  The tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man.  They will be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description.  The child would be handicapped in life to be ignorant of these tales.

Tales suitable for the little child may be viewed under these seven classes of available types:  (1) the accumulative, or clock story; (2) the animal tale; (3) the humorous tale; (4) the realistic tale; (5) the romantic tale; (6) the old tale; and (7) the modern tale.

I. The Accumulative Tale.

The accumulative tale is the simplest form of the tale.  It may be:—­

     (1) A tale of simple repetition.

     (2) A tale of repetition with an addition, incremental iteration.

     (3) A tale of repetition, with variation.

Repetition and rhythm have grown out of communal conditions.  The old stories are measured utterances.  At first there was the spontaneous expression of a little community, with its gesture, action, sound, and dance, and the word, the shout, to help out.  There was the group which repeated, which acted as a chorus, and the leader who added his individual variation.  From these developed the folk-tale with the dialogue in place of the chorus.

Of the accumulative tales, The House that Jack Built illustrates the first class of tales of simple repetition.  This tale takes on a new interest as a remarkable study of phonics.  If any one were so happy as to discover the phonic law which governs the euphony produced by the succession of vowels in the lines of Milton’s poetry, he would enjoy the same law worked out in The House that Jack Built.  The original, as given by Halliwell in his Nursery Rhymes of England, is said to be a Hebrew hymn, at first written in Chaldaic.  To the Hebrews of the Middle Ages it was called the Haggadah, and was sung to a rude chant as part of the Passover service.  It first appeared in print in 1590, at Prague.  Later, in Leipzig, it was published by the German scholar, Liebrecht.  It begins:—­

     A kid, a kid, my father bought
     For two pieces of money: 
     A kid, a kid,
     Then came the cat and ate the kid, etc.

Then follow the various repetitive stanzas, the last one turning back and reacting on all the others:—­