=Suggestions to the teacher.= The story of Joseph is one which no teacher ought have any great difficulty in imparting to children, for it is a natural favorite with them. They like it because its ideas are simple and come, for the most part, within the range of a child's experience. The attitude of Joseph's brothers to him is not dissimilar to the resentment that children display at any indication of favoritism on the part of a teacher, a resentment which is invariably visited on "teacher's pet". The story appeals to them also because of the rapidity of its movement, the constant shifting of scenes and incidents, each making a new bid for their attention, and the heroic nature of the action, in which the motives of the characters whether good or evil reveal themselves not in mere thoughts and words but in deeds. There could be no greater mistake, therefore, than to deprive the story of all its force through interrupting the flow of the narrative by tedious moralizing. The Biblical story does not stop to moralize, yet the moral is clear enough, and so it will be to the class if the teacher tells his tale with the proper feeling and spirit. But the teacher must be cautioned, on the other hand, not to take for granted the child's comprehension unaided of even so simple a story as this. Any addition of details inserted into the narrative with a view to helping the child visualize the incidents told is always in order. In telling of how Joseph was lowered into the pit, speak of his ineffectual cries and struggles to escape, for, though children have good imaginations, they have not had enough experience out of which their imagination could reconstruct the whole situation from a mere hint or two. Similarly such words as pit or caravan need descriptive epithets or phrases to bring them before the child's eye. Moreover, the motives of the characters must be made clear by a casual reference to analogous experiences of the child, as for instance: "Now, when his brothers saw that Joseph was better loved by his father than the rest of them they became very angry at him and instead of trying to win their father's love for themselves also, they tried to get even with Joseph, just as I have sometimes seen boys at school get angry at a classmate of theirs and do all sorts of mischief to him just because the teacher gave him higher marks than the others who were not so successful with their lessons." But all such comparisons must be made only in a casual way and in as few words as possible lest they divert the mind of the child from the main trend of the narrative. One should not forget for this lesson the usefulness of pictures as helping to visualize the story, and there are many good illustrations of this story to be had. A still greater assistance in impressing this lesson is that obtained by permitting the children to dramatize it and act it, for this necessitates their comprehension of the motives of the characters. CHAPTER XX