Of course, when we say "read," we use the word in the broad sense of rendering the matter _viva voce_, whether it be actual reading from the text or reciting. While the person who is reading a story to children must be most concerned with spirit and meaning, he must not, if he suppose himself to be teaching literature, neglect the matter of style. If the story is a translated one, he must make or choose some beautiful translation. Everything that he reads to them he must work over beforehand, so that he can give it with effective certainty. He more than defeats his purpose who transmits to his children no matter how good a story in slip-shod sentences, commonplace phrasing, go-easy enunciation; or, worse than that, in the ostentatiously childlike language and manner that constitute official kindergartenese, or in the hilariously cheerful manner which marks traditional Sunday-schoolese; or, worst of all, in that tone of cheap irony that so many people see fit to adopt for all their communications with children. It is the tone of the average adult whenever he enters into conversation with any acquaintance under twelve--an underbred or quite uncalled-for tone of badinage, of quizzing, of insincerity. It is an unpardonable misunderstanding of the dignity and seriousness of children to offer them babble when they ask only simplicity, or to treat with flippancy what to them are the serious things of art. It should be quite possible to be serious without being solemn, and cheerful without being hilarious. This matter of a good style and form is so important that a teacher should achieve it at any cost of trouble and study. I like to use every opportunity to say that he should so thoroughly know his story or poem, be it the simplest old fairy-tale, or the veriest nursery-jingle, that he loves and respects it as art; and should so know and respect his audience and his purpose that a good and suitable literary form flows from him inevitably; or, if he is reading an actual text, that every sentence is both appreciative and interpretative. But, if he cannot achieve this, let him in the first instance write out a good form of his story, or find one and memorize it. There is no denying that in the hands of a cold and mechanical person this production will display some priggishness and false propriety. But the failure as literary training would be less disastrous in this case than if the same person gave a haphazard and commonplace impromptu version.