As to the way in which the conclusion is brought to pass, there is to the child and to the childlike mind, in literature as in life, something eminently satisfying in poetic justice. Legal justice is cold and formal to them, except indeed in those frequent cases in which it is a vehicle of vengeance. Besides, it seems to produce an effect really alien to the cause; as in the penalties of the sufferers in the _Inferno_, the inevitableness of the effect is obscured by the many complex stages that intervene between it and the cause. Logical justice--the natural, uninterrupted working of the forces and motives to a conclusion, or to their absorption into a new combination--is both too slow and not striking enough. Besides, logical justice, working in its impersonal, undiscriminating way, is too likely to hurt someone in the piece whom we love, or to spare somebody we hate. In short, your elementary class demands poetic justice--demands it strong and desires it quick. Now, poetic justice is, on the whole, the way of art, until we come practically to the realistic art of our own generation. It tends to secure completeness and unity. As a matter of fact, in practically every short and completed story of the kind we choose for children the end is precipitated and adjusted by the operation of poetic justice. One would be blind indeed who was unaware of the fact that precisely here lies one of the dangers of the training in literature. It is this that tends to give the mind that has had too large a diet of literature, or to which literature has been unwisely administered, a distorted view of life, obscuring its vision with sentimentality and unreality. To guard against these effects we should see to it that the children do not have an unduly large amount of literature; and we should select those stories in which the operation of poetic justice is as little misleading as possible. Poetic justice may be, and usually is, an ideal, an artistic distribution of rewards and punishments; but it need not be a haphazard and lawless distribution. There is an artistic flaw in a story in which the rewards go to a person who has not legitimately awakened our sympathies; it is not safe to say that the reward should go to him who has deserved it, for in some of the most acceptable children's stories sympathy sets aside deserving--_The Musicians of Bremen_, for example. We are satisfied with the success of the musicians, because, being innocent and persecuted, they have gained our sympathy, and are therefore in the line for reward. But the youngest child whom I have tested on this point disapproves the outcome of the folk-tale of "Lazy Jack" (Joseph Jacob's _English Fairy Tales_), in which a noodle whose stupidity has caused a king's daughter, previously dumb, to laugh, and so to gain her voice, is rewarded by being married to the restored princess. It is not difficult to avoid those stories in which poetic justice is perverted justice.