name was Raggylug, and his mother’s name was Molly Cottontail.  And every morning, when Molly Cottontail went out to get their food, she said to Raggylug, ’Now, Raggylug, remember you are only a baby rabbit, and don’t move from the nest.  No matter what you hear, no matter what you see, don’t you move!’”—­all this is different still, yet it is familiar, too; it appears that rabbits are rather like folks.  So the tale proceeds, and the little furry rabbit passes through experiences strange to little boys, yet very like little boys’ adventures in some respects; he is frightened by a snake, comforted by his mammy, and taken to a new house, under the long grass a long way off.  These are all situations to which the child has a key.  There is just enough of strangeness to entice, just enough of the familiar to relieve any strain.  When the child has lived through the day’s happenings with Raggylug, the latter has begun to seem veritably a little brother of the grass to him.  And because he has entered imaginatively into the feelings and fate of a creature different from himself, he has taken his first step out into the wide world of the lives of others.

[Footnote 1:  See Raggylug, page 135.]

It may be a recognition of this factor and its value which has led so many writers of nature stories into the error of over-humanising their four-footed or feathered heroes and heroines.  The exaggeration is unnecessary, for there is enough community of lot suggested in the sternest scientific record to constitute a natural basis for sympathy on the part of the human animal.  Without any falsity of presentation whatever, the nature story may be counted on as a help in the beginnings of culture of the sympathies.  It is not, of course, a help confined to the powers of the nature story; all types of story share in some degree the powers of each.  But each has some especial virtue in dominant degree, and the nature story is, on this ground, identified with the thought given.

The nature story shares its influence especially with

THE HISTORICAL STORY

As the one widens the circle of connection with other kinds of life, the other deepens the sense of relation to past lives; it gives the sense of background, of the close and endless connection of generation with generation.  A good historical story vitalises the conception of past events and brings their characters into relation with the present.  This is especially true of stories of things and persons in the history of our own race.  They foster race-consciousness, the feeling of kinship and community of blood.  It is this property which makes the historical story so good an agent for furthering a proper national pride in children.  Genuine patriotism, neither arrogant nor melodramatic, is so generally recognised as having its roots in early training that I need not dwell on this possibility, further than to note its