There is such a thing as literary reading as distinguished from the reading of matter technical in content and merely intellectual in appeal. Teachers, accustomed as they are to read for facts and intent upon the logical emphasis, are peculiarly prone to read literature poorly--missing the music and the emotion, rendering it all in the hard intellectual manner that is acceptable only as the vehicle of the colorless matter of a technical treatise. There is also such a thing as the telling of a literary story, as distinguished from the telling of any other story. A narrative of events in history, an account of some occurrence in nature or ordinary affairs, may be expected to proceed from point to point without arrangement or succession other than the order of incidents as they occur. The interest is the interest of fact; the thread is that of cause and effect, or any other plain sequence. But in the literary story the incidents are sifted and arranged. Certain details are prophecies--foreshadowings of things to come; certain incidents are vital turning-points in the action; certain phrases are the key and counter-sign of the whole story; some paragraphs are plain narration; some are calm description; some are poetic interpretation; some roar with action; some glow with emotion; some sparkle with fun; some lie in shadow, others stand forth in the brilliant light; there are movements in the story, marked by a change of scene, a change of situation, a pause in the action--parts which would be marked in the drama as scenes or acts; there is the gradual approach to the center, the pivotal occurrence, the readjustment of affairs to ordinary life. Ideally, all these things will be indicated in the presentation that an accomplished story-teller makes of a literary story. This seems to set the standard very high--too high for the discouraged attempt of the overworked grade teacher. If so, she may reflect that it is triumphantly true that such is the affinity between the child and the story that he will get much delight and nourishment out of any telling of it. Who has not hesitated between a smile and a tear at the spectacle of a child or a class hanging enthralled and hungry upon a story rendered by a mother or a teacher whose every pronunciation was a jar, whose every cadence a dislocation, and whose every emphasis a misinterpretation? And remember, the art of story-telling is not the art of the theater, not the art of the actress, but the art of the mother, the nurse; the art of the "spinsters and the knitters in the sun;" the art of the wandering minstrel, of the journeyman tailor, of the exiled younger brother; art designed to reach, not an audience beyond the footlights, but one gathered on the sunny bench of the market-place, on the hearth-stone, under the nursery lamp, in the shady garden, and in their own teacher's schoolroom.