The telling of stories refreshes the mind as a bath refreshes the body.  It gives exercise to the intellect and its powers.  It tests the judgments and feelings.  The story-teller must wholly take into himself the life of which he speaks, must let it live and operate in himself freely.  He must reproduce it whole and undiminished, yet stand superior to life as it actually is.—­FROEBEL.

The purpose of the story.—­To look out with new eyes upon the many-featured, habitable world; to be thrilled by the pity and the beauty of this life of ours, itself brief as a tale that is told; to learn to know men and women better, and to love them more.—­BLISS PERRY.

Expertness in teaching consists in a scholarly command of subject-matter, in a better organization of character, in a larger and more versatile command of conscious modes of transmitting facts and ideals, and in a more potent and winsome, forceful and sympathetic manner of personal contact with other human beings.—­HENRY SUZZALLO.

Story-telling as an art.  No matter how perfectly the tale, in a subjective sense, may contain the interests of the child, or how carefully it may avoid what repels him; though in an objective sense it may stand the test of a true classic in offering a permanent enrichment of the mind and the test of literature in appealing to the emotions and the imagination, in giving a contribution of truth and an embodiment of good form; though it may stand the test of the short-story—­furnishinginteresting characters, definite plot, and effective setting; though its sequence be orderly and its climax pointed, its narration consistent and its description apt—­the tale yet remains to be told.  The telling of the tale is a distinct art governed by distinct principles because the life of the story must be transmitted and rendered into voice.

Story-telling is one of the most ancient and universal of arts.  Concerning this art Thackeray has said:—­

Stories exist everywhere:  there is no calculating the distance through which stories have come to us, the number of languages through which they have been filtered, or the centuries during which they have been told.  Many of them have been narrated almost in their present shape for thousands of years to the little copper-colored Sanskrit children, listening to their mothers under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow Jumna—­their Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the ring in her nose.  The very same tale has been heard by the northern Vikings as they lay on their shields on deck; and the Arabs couched under the stars on the Syrian plains when their flocks were gathered in, and their mares were picketed by the tents.

In his Roundabout Papers, Thackeray gives a picture of a score of white-bearded, white-robed warriors or grave seniors of the city, seated at the gate of Jaffa or Beyrout, listening to the story-teller reciting