But coming still closer to the choosing of the actual specimens for the classes, it would be only fatuous to ignore the fact that when we come to the matter of the final choice, we are upon difficult ground, educationally and critically. But we can save ourselves from presumption and dogmatism by discussing a few practical, but general, grounds of choice, reminding ourselves that in the specific school and with the specific class many modifying minor principles will arise. The teacher will be much comforted and steadied if he remember that he is teaching _literature_, and is therefore freed from any obligation to the stories as myth, or as scientific folk-lore, as sociology or as nature-study; let nothing tempt him to the study of the first member of the company of musicians of Bremen, as "a type of the solid-hoofed animals," of _Red Riding-Hood_ as a "dawn-myth," or of _The Three Bears_ as "parenthood in the wild." The teacher will select those tales that have somewhere in their history acquired an artistic organization, rejecting in favor of them those which remain chaotic and disorganized. Compare, for example, in this matter, the perfect little plot of Madame Villeneuve's _Beauty and the Beast_ with Grimm's _The Golden Bird_--a string of loosely connected, partly irrelevant incidents. He will prefer those that display economy of incident--in which each incident helps along the action, or contributes something essential to the situation. Of course, it is rather characteristic of the folk-mind, as of the child-mind, to heap up incidents _à propos de bottes_; but as this is one of the characteristics to be corrected in the child by his training in literature, so it is one of the faults which should exclude a fairy-tale from his curriculum. To make the difference among the stories in this regard quite clear, compare the neat, orderly, and essential flow of incident in _The Musicians of Bremen_ with the baffling multiplicity and confusion displayed by Madame d'Aulnoy's _The Wonderful Sheep_. Other things being equal, he will prefer for discipline those fairy-stories which use the fairy and other preternatural elements in artistic moderation, to those that fill every incident with marvels and introduce supernatural machinery apparently out of mere exuberance. This element is much more impressive when used in art with reticence and economy. Even a little child grows too familiar with marvels when these crowd one another on every page, and ceases either to shiver or to thrill. In the fairy-tale, as in art for mature people, the supernatural should appear only at the ultimate moment, or for the ultimate purpose, and then in amount and potency only sufficient to accomplish the result. Perrault was very cautious upon this point; in all his tales he seems to have reduced the element of the marvelous to the smallest amount and to have called upon it only at the pivotal points. Compare in his