Of course, as they advance the children awaken, or should be awakened, to some of the more delicate discriminations of motive and action--to the conception of a man who is mixed good and bad; and to a realization of a character changed under our eyes by some experience or by the influence of another person; to some estimate of the farther-reaching consequences of the deeds we witness in our story. And before they have finally passed out of the elementary grades, we may expect them to be able to consider the problems and contradictions that lie, for example, in the character of Shylock; they could see his fundamental passions--race-hatred, avarice; they could estimate his motives--personal dislike of the merchant, revenge of his own wrongs and loneliness; they could try to estimate the effect of his character and conduct on the fortunes and characters of the whole group, and finally upon his own fortunes. They might, in the same general and simple way, follow the spiritual struggles of Brutus: his great underlying passions--patriotism and love of friend; his immediate motives to save his country; the effect of his deed; the telling contrasts between him and Cassius, him and Mark Antony. The study of character in these broader lines--the fundamental qualities or passions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious results in personal and social ways of these actions--constitutes the utmost we should try to do in this direction, leaving for a later period, when the children's social interests are broadened, and when they have developed from within a deeper sense of moral experience, the more delicate and difficult matters of the evolution and interplay of character. Of equal importance in a story with the run of events or plot, and with the persons or characters, is this third thing--the outcome or issue. It is surely wise to follow, for the younger children, the hint given by their own tastes and by the primitive story-tellers, to the extent of giving them prevailingly such stories as have a distinct and signal outcome, leaving the uncertainties and inconclusions of a thoroughgoing realism for a much later period. It is best, on the whole, that the children see the issues of their story settled, the actions passing on to accomplishment--this for the artistic as well as for the moral effect of the tale. It enables them to regard it as a finished whole, having unity and completeness; and it throws light on all the events and persons in the story, to see how things come out in the end.