But we are more interested, naturally, in the positive services performed by the stories of real life; or to be more explicit, those stories told with the effect of actuality, and with the atmosphere of verisimilitude. Of course, we should require of these stories good form and good writing, so that we may expect from them on that side what we expect from any good literature. In addition, we may expect them to perform for the children and for all of us certain distinctive artistic services. First, they operate to throw back upon actual life the glow of art. Those stories which use people and circumstances that we can match in our own actual surroundings and experiences impress upon us most vividly the fact, so important for our real culture both in art and in life, that literature is in a very real sense a presentation of life; that these charming people and things are but images taken up from the real world, chosen and raised to this level, by which very process they are invested with a halo of beauty and distinction. This nimbus of art casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. A group of children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable, found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer's window. The same children, having learned Lowell's phrase of the dandelion's "dusty gold," were not satisfied till they had made a beautiful phrase to render the burnished gold of the butter-cups. The same class on a picnic labored with ardor to make a beautiful verse about Uneeda biscuits and ginger-ale, to match the Persian's "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread." They were much baffled when they finally concluded that it would not go--that these modern and specific articles refused to wear a halo.