"The prodigal had not enjoyed nearly as much as he expected--what he had arranged to enjoy. His scheme had collapsed; his experiment broken down. Going away from home and living as though he had no home had not worked as he expected that it was going to. Lonely, ragged, hungry, he thought the thing all over and said to himself: 'I think I had better go home.' He had let go of home, but home had declined to let go of him. He had been his father's boy for twenty years or more, and his experience in the far country had not been quite able to cure him of it. Home still had a pull upon him." While many of the stories both of the Old and of the New Testament need expansion rather than contraction--think of trying to bring the masterly story of Jonah or the wonderfully simple tale of the Shunemite's son into any smaller compass!--yet the need of condensing the long stories, of Abraham, Joseph, David, Daniel, for instance, is obvious, for we must give the children a picture of the whole life and character of these great and simple figures. To this end selection and suppression are necessary. The various books mentioned in a later chapter are all more or less successful in the attempt to recast the old original story. So perfect is the original form, however, that the task is one of extreme difficulty. Yet it must be attempted by every teacher, and it is certainly worth a trial. The following suggestions may prove helpful in both modes of adaptation: 1. Use direct discourse. It will require an effort to keep yourself (in your embarrassment) from taking refuge behind the indirect form, saying, for example, "And when he came to himself he said _that he would_ arise and go to _his_ father and tell him _that he had_ sinned." 2. Choose actions rather than descriptions, the dynamics rather than the statics of your subject. Those of us who have grown away from childhood tend to reverse the true order, to place the emphasis on the question, "What kind of a man was he," and not on, "What did he do." Let what he did tell what he was. Your story will thus have "go," as all Bible stories have. 3. Use concrete terms, not abstract; tell what was done, not how somebody felt or thought when something was being done; be objective, not subjective. 4. A story-teller should, in short, have taste. To form this taste it is indispensable that he should not read, but _drink in_ the great masters: Homer, Chaucer, Bunyan, Hawthorne ("The Wonder Book," for example), and above all the Bible itself. No one can absorb these without unconsciously forming a pure, simple style and getting a more childlike point of view and way of speech. Modern writers and modern ways of thinking are, in general, too reflective, self-conscious, subjective, and, where children are concerned, too direct, bare, "preachy."