Late in the evening the other soldiers were put in their box, and the people of the house went to bed. Now was the time for the toys to play; they amused themselves with paying visits, fighting battles and giving balls. The tin soldiers rustled about in their box, for they wanted to join the games, but they could not get the lid off. The nut-crackers turned somersaults, and the pencil scribbled nonsense on the slate. Now, from this point onwards in the story, the events will be quite outside the personal experience of the child and there will have to be a real stretch of imagination to appreciate the thrilling and blood- curdling adventures of the tin soldier, namely, the terrible sailing down the gutter under the bridge, the meeting with the fierce rat who demands the soldier's passport, the horrible sensation in the fish's body, etc. Last of all, perhaps, will come the appreciation of the best qualities of the hero: his modesty, his dignity, his reticence, his courage and his constancy. He seems to combine all the qualities of the best soldier with those of the best civilian, without the more obvious qualities which generally attract first. As for the love story, we must _expect_ any child to see its tenderness and beauty, though the individual child may intuitively appreciate these qualities, but it is not what we wish for or work for at this period of child life. This method could be applied to various stories. I have chosen the "Tin Soldier" because of its dramatic qualities and because it is marked off, probably quite unconsciously on the part of Andersen, into periods which correspond to the child's development. In Eugene Field's exquisite little poem of "The Dinkey Bird," we find the objects familiar to the child in _unusual_ places, so that some imagination is needed to realize that "big red sugar-plums are clinging to the cliffs beside the sea"; but the introduction of the fantastic bird and the soothing sound of amfalula tree are new and delightful sensations, quite out of the child's personal experience. Another such instance is to be found in Mrs. W. K. Clifford's story of "Master Willie." The abnormal behavior of familiar objects, such as a doll, leads from the ordinary routine to the paths of adventure. This story is to be found in a little book called "Very Short Stories," a most interesting collection for teachers and children. We now come to the second element we should seek in material, namely, the element of the unusual, which we have already anticipated in the story of the "Tin Soldier."