It is from the use of stories elaborate enough and developed enough to have a plot that genuine disciplinary value may be expected. The merely chaotic or haphazard run of incidents may amuse and interest the children, but it yields nothing of artistic training. Two very simple specimens (useful for so many purposes) will illustrate the point. Take the story adumbrated in _The House That Jack Built_. This is a series of incidents linked together in the accumulative fashion, but proceeding in a straight line and stopping short off without issue or event. Compare it with the equally primitive accumulative tale of _The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence_, from which invaluable tale one can exemplify all the main devices of successful plot-making; the incidents are arranged in a charming pattern, so that the action rises to a summit, descends to an end, and produces an effect; there is the proper proportion of involution (save the mark!), of the making of difficulties, stating the problem, awakening our sympathies; this is followed by the due process of resolution, unraveling the difficulties, with the final restoration of the action to the normal level with the purpose of the story achieved. It is this kind of story that adds to interest and amusement that additional charm of artistic structure which distinguishes literature from mere writing. Now, while it is true that a symmetrical plot constitutes in part the educational value of a story, it is quite obvious to those who know both children and stories that intricate and elaborate plots should not be given to folks in the elementary classes. A story in which the threads of the plot are many or disparate, or one in which the actions must be often, or for any long while, kept separate, confuses rather than trains the young children. Better for them are those stories whose plots are open and simple, where the actions of the interlinked threads coincide as much as possible. Certain traditional plot devices are out of place in a story chosen for these children; suspense and mystification, for example, those devices so dear in their myriad forms to the cheap and sensational novelist, and so indispensable to the interest of the uncultivated reader, are not desirable in the children's class. Their interest needs no such stimulus; their attention should not be subjected to the strain, nor their nerves to the shock, of a sustained suspense with its consequent surprise. Rather, their story should move openly and directly, depending for its power upon the skilful interrelation of its interests, yielding the pleasure of recognition and sympathy, so much more artistic and disciplinary than the pleasure of surprise. For this reason plots of the type of Shakespeare's great plots, of the type of Perrault's _Cinderella_, in which the reader is in the confidence of the author from the beginning, are to be desired for the little people. If for any reason it seems well to tell to the younger children a long