Another very necessary quality in the mere artifice of story-telling is to watch your audience, so as to be able to know whether its mood is for action or reaction, and to alter your story accordingly. The moods of reaction are rarer, and you must use them for presenting a different kind of material. Here is your opportunity for introducing a piece of poetic description, given in beautiful language, to which the children cannot listen when they are eager for action and dramatic excitement. Perhaps one of the greatest artifices is to take a quick hold of your audience by a striking beginning which will enlist their attention from the start. You can then relax somewhat, but you must be careful also of the end because that is what remains most vivid to the children. If you question them as to which story they like best in a program, you will constantly find it to be the last one you have told, which has for the moment blurred out the others. Here are a few specimens of beginnings which seldom fail to arrest the attention of the child: "There was once a giant ogre, and he lived in a cave by himself." From "The Giant and Jack-straws," David Starr Jordan. "There were once twenty-five tin soldiers, who were all brothers, for they had been made out of the same old tin spoon." From "The Tin Soldier," Hans Christian Andersen. "There was once an Emperor who had a horse shod with gold." From "The Beetle," Hans Christian Andersen. "There was once a merchant who was so rich that he could have paved the whole street with gold, and even then he would have had enough for a small alley." From the "The Flying Trunk," Hans Christian Andersen. "There was once a shilling which came forth from the mint springing and shouting, 'Hurrah! Now I am going out into the wide world.'" From "The Silver Shilling," Hans Christian Andersen. "In the High and Far Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk." From "The Elephant's Child": "Just So Stories," Rudyard Kipling. "Not always was the Kangaroo as now we behold him, but a Different Animal with four short legs." From "Old Man Kangaroo": "Just So Stories," Rudyard Kipling. "Whichever way I turn," said the weather-cock on a high steeple, "no one is satisfied." From "Fire-side Fables," Edwin Barrow. "A set of chessmen, left standing on their board, resolved to alter the rules of the game." From the same source. "The Pink Parasol had tender whalebone ribs and a slender stick of cherry-wood." From "Very Short Stories," Mrs. W. K. Clifford. "There was once a poor little Donkey on Wheels: it had never wagged its tail, or tossed its head, or said 'Hee-haw,' or tasted a tender thistle." From the same source. Now, some of these beginnings are, of course, for very young children, but they all have the same advantage, that of plunging _in medias res_, and, therefore, arrest attention at once, contrary to the stories which open on a leisurely note of description.