Then, again, we have the passage from George Eliot's "Mill on the Floss": "Oh, dear! I wish they would not fight at your school, Tom. Didn't it hurt you?" "Hurt me? No," said Tom, putting up the hooks again, taking out a large pocketknife, and slowly opening the largest blade, which he looked at meditatively as he rubbed his finger along it. Then he added: "I gave Spooner a black eye--that's what he got for wanting to leather me. I wasn't going to go halves because anybody leathered me." "Oh! how brave you are, Tom. I think you are like Samson. If there came a lion roaring at men, I think you'd fight him, wouldn't you, Tom?" "How can a lion come roaring at you, you silly thing? There's no lions only in the shows." "No, but if we were in the lion countries--I mean in Africa where it's very hot, the lions eat people there. I can show it you in the book where I read it." "Well, I should get a gun and shoot him." "But if you hadn't a gun?--we might have gone out, you know, not thinking, just as we go out fishing, and then a great lion might come towards us roaring, and we could not get away from him. What should you do, Tom?" Tom paused, and at last turned away contemptuously, saying: "But the lion _isn't_ coming. What's the use of talking?" This passage illustrates also the difference between the highly- developed imagination of the one and the stodgy prosaical temperament of the other. Tom could enter into the elementary question of giving his schoolfellow a black eye, but could not possibly enter into the drama of the imaginary arrival of a lion. He was sorely in need of fairy stories. It is to this element we have to cater, and we cannot shirk our responsibilities. William James says: "Living things, moving things or things that savor of danger or blood, that have a dramatic quality, these are the things natively interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else, and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have grown up, will keep in touch with his pupils by constant appeal to such matters as these."[32] Of course the savor of danger and blood is only _one_ of the things to which we should appeal, but I give the whole passage to make the point clearer. This is one of the most difficult parts of our selection, namely, how to present enough excitement for the child and yet include enough constructive element which will satisfy him when the thirst for "blugginess" is slaked.