story built upon suspense and surprise, it is generally well to let them know very soon the issue of affairs--the ultimate disaster or reconciliation--so that they may be free from anxiety and able to attend to the more real matter of the story as it proceeds. This teaching applies to the younger children; as they grow older, they become able to get desirable intellectual experience out of a good detective story, or one with a fairly deep mystification in it, like _Treasure Island_. The older children, too, may profitably handle a more intricate plot--_Ivanhoe_ with its four threads of interest and activity, _The Merchant of Venice_ with the action shifting about from scene to scene among its various groups. By handling a plot as a matter of literary study we mean, examining it from these points of view. 1. What are the difficulties set up? 2. By what devices are the difficulties constituted--conspiracy, intrigue, disguise, quarrel blood-feud, race-hatred, etc., etc.? 3. How are the difficulties removed? 4. How many threads of interest has the plot? 5. How are they linked together or interwoven? 6. How logical and how fair is the outcome? Other questions to be considered in studying the plot will arise in the study of an actual story with an actual class. Of fundamental interest in the story are the persons or characters, and it is of prime importance that teachers--be they mothers or masters--should know how to educate the children in this matter. From one point of view--that of the activities of the story, in which the younger children are mainly interested--there are two kinds of persons: those who do things; those who receive things, or for whose sake, or merely in whose presence, things are done. The former are the agents--the pushing, active adventurous persons, who, good or ill, make things happen; the latter are often mere figures, important and perhaps beautiful, put into the story to represent institutions or ideas--like the father of Cinderella, who is merely an institutional father; or they are devices for getting on with the plot, like the fairy godmother; or they are the rewards of endeavor, like the King's daughter given in marriage in many a folk-tale. From another point of view, which regards the actors in the story, not as persons, but as characters, they may be divided into two types; those who are fixed, static, from the beginning--who come into the story fully equipped, and do not change at all within its limits; those who change or develop under the influence of others and of their experiences.