3. Practice. The effects of practice have already been cited in the case of Beecher. It is one of the mournful facts of human life that so many powers that might have been brought out by practice always remain in the latent state. Practice story-telling, practice finding "likes," and you will find before long that there is growing up in you a new power, just as if you were to discover in your organism a stop, by pulling which you could jump ten feet in the air. "Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first." And a course of nephews and nieces is the best of practice for story-tellers, and for those who would be adepts in the use of side-lights. A word of caution. Great care must be used not to make the stories and illustrations more prominent than the truth we wish to illustrate. Dr. William M. Taylor tells of a conversation with a carpenter in which he advised him to use certain decorations. "That," said the carpenter, "would violate the first rule of architecture. We must never construct ornament but only ornament construction." So it is in story-telling. Never tell a story for its own sake, merely, but for the sake of the truth that lies embedded in it. A story or an illustration must grow as naturally out of the subject as a flower grows out of a plant. V. STORIES AND STORY-TELLING. That was a profound and true saying uttered by President G. Stanley Hall not long ago, that "of all the things that a teacher should know how to do the most important, without any exception, is to be able to tell a story." And a student pursuing a university course in education, after seeking to know what stories to choose, where to find them, how and to whom and wherefore to tell them, touched the same truth when he said, "It gradually dawned upon me that if I knew how to tell a story, I had mastered the main part of the art of teaching." For to know a good story is to have literary and pedagogic taste; to adapt or make a good story for children is both to know the secret of the mind of a child and to have creative power; to tell a good story is to be a master of a noble art. The child's thirst for stories--has it no significance, and does it not lay a duty upon us? And yet the insatiableness of the child's thirst is often paralleled by the inadequacy of the teacher's power to satisfy it, and by the parent's despair at being so bankrupt of material. In his admirable suggestions for making the Sunday-school able to appeal to the interest and the respect of boys and girls who are no longer children, and whom to treat as children is an offense against good taste and Christian charity, Bishop Vincent recommends, among other things, "lectures and outlines, and independent statements by individual pupils and teachers." Story-telling, both by teachers and pupils, is here suggested as a means of further enrichment.