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WORLD STORIES RETOLD


[Illustration: GLAD COMRADESHIP WITH THE GLADNESS OF A CHILD]




  WORLD STORIES
  RETOLD
  FOR
  MODERN BOYS AND GIRLS

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SEVEN FIVE-MINUTE CLASSIC STORIES FOR
  RETELLING IN HOME, SUNDAY-SCHOOL, CHILDREN’S SERVICES, PUBLIC
  SCHOOL GRADES, AND “THE STORY-HOUR” IN PUBLIC LIBRARIES

  With Practical Suggestions for Telling

  BY

  WILLIAM JAMES SLY, PH. D.

  Director of Sunday-School and Young People’s Work, and Teacher
  of Sunday-School Pedagogy in Colorado Woman’s College

  PHILADELPHIA
  THE GRIFFITH & ROWLAND PRESS
  BOSTON    ST. LOUIS
  CHICAGO   TORONTO, CAN.




  Copyright 1914 by

  A. J. ROWLAND, Secretary

  Published December, 1914




  TO

  Ellsworth

  AND

  THE HOSTS OF BOYS AND GIRLS SCATTERED
  EVERYWHERE TO WHOM I HAVE TOLD
  MANY OF THESE STORIES AND FROM
  WHOM I HAVE RECEIVED WARM
  APPRECIATION AND LOVE




PREFACE


This book is intended chiefly for the home. It is an aid to parents in
introducing their children to some of the best stories in the world. It
will be of obvious value also to Sunday-school teachers, ministers who
preach to children, public-school teachers, kindergartners, librarians,
and to all who perceive that the story method is the golden method of
teaching.

“Where can I find suitable stories to tell?” is a frequent question
asked by lovers of children who take seriously their cry of
soul-hunger, “Tell me a story!” Oral story-telling within recent years
has had a remarkable revival, and a response to both the child’s and
the parent’s plea has been made in a number of charming collections
of children’s stories and manuals on the art of story-telling. But it
is well known that books of stories with material in a form readily
adapted for telling are very few. Fewer still have attempted to gather
into one volume those old favorites which should be the heritage of
each succeeding generation of children. True, there are collections
in many volumes, such as “The Children’s Hour,” in ten volumes;
the “Junior Classics,” in ten volumes; and the series, “What Every
Child Should Know,” in twenty volumes; but these, admirable in many
respects, are bulky, expensive, and forbidden to all except the favored
children of the rich. Mothers frequently ask for something condensed,
comprehensive, and simple. It is to meet such a need, often expressed
to him, that the author has gathered, during a number of years of
experience in moral and religious education, these World Stories for
telling to modern boys and girls.

Almost all of the many stories in this book he has himself told at
various times before differing audiences of children, young people,
and adults--audiences varying from one or two open-eyed listeners in
the home, or the little group in the country Sunday-school or wayside
schoolhouse, to the large classes and assemblies in high schools,
colleges, city libraries, Sunday-schools, churches, and conventions.
In many cases children and young people have retold these stories in
almost the exact language here given.

The principle on which these stories have been adapted and rewritten
is largely that of condensation. There is undoubtedly a certain
cultural atmosphere created in the very language and spirit of these
fine old tales, but the descriptive adornments often lead to a length
that is unattractive to the busy mother or teacher, as well as trying
to the strength of mind and memory of the child. Given the real
facts, illustrating the moral principle desired to be imparted, the
story-teller may elaborate as much as imagination, interest, and time
permit. After such an early introduction in childhood to these stories
that for unnumbered generations have furnished food to mind, memory,
heart, and will, the boy and girl will experience a keener joy in after
years when the fuller versions are read in the original or in larger
books.

In the preparation of these pages, the author has been favored with
the generous counsel, aid, and encouragement of specialists in child
psychology, pedagogy, and story-telling, among whom mention must be
made especially of Dr. Richard Morse Hodge, of Columbia University,
one of whose articles printed in “Religious Education” suggested
this work; Dr. Henry F. Cope, Secretary of the Religious Education
Association; John L. Alexander, Secondary Division Superintendent of
the International Sunday School Association; and my friend, Dr. Irving
E. Miller, of Rochester University, and author of “The Psychology of
Thinking.” To these, as well as to a host of teachers and principals of
public schools, pastors and superintendents in churches, and mothers
and fathers in homes, who so graciously permitted experimentation with
these stories, gratitude is sincerely expressed.

                                                         WILLIAM J. SLY.

  UNIVERSITY PARK, DENVER, COLO.




TABLE OF CONTENTS


  PART I. THE ART OF STORY-TELLING

                                                   PAGE

     I. VALUE OF STORIES                              3

    II. THE PERIODS OF INTEREST IN STORIES           16

   III. TYPES OF STORIES TO TELL                     23

    IV. PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR STORY-TELLING      36

     V. GAMES WITH STORIES                           41

    VI. USE OF THE ETHICAL INDEX                     44


  PART II. STORIES TO TELL

     I. FAIRY AND WONDER TALES                       47

    II. FABLES                                       66

   III. FOLK-TALES                                   77

    IV. FAVORITES                                    90

     V. CHRISTMAS STORIES                           108

    VI. BIBLE STORIES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT        115

   VII. BIBLE STORIES FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT        150

  VIII. GENERAL HISTORICAL STORIES                  182

    IX. AMERICAN HISTORICAL STORIES                 200

     X. HEROES OF PEACE                             233

    XI. MODERN BOYS AND GIRLS WHO BECAME USEFUL     246

        ALPHABETICAL LIST OF STORIES                289

        ETHICAL INDEX OF STORIES                    291




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    PAGE

  _Glad comradeship with the gladness of a child_         _Frontispiece_

  “_Good morning, little girl, where are you going?_”                 54

  “_Those who play and dance all summer must expect to dance hungry
    to bed in winter_”                                                71

  _Offero... began to cross the flood_                              109

  “_Entreat me not to leave thee_”                                   132

  _When Jesus was a boy_                                             153

  _Stone marking the line of the Minute Men at Lexington_            215

  _Grace, pulling at one oar, and her father at the other_           237

  _Helen Keller_                                                     287




Part I

The Art of Story-Telling




I

VALUE OF STORIES


Stories are the language of childhood. They are mirrors of nature in
which the child beholds his natural face “as in a glass.” They appeal
to every instinct of child nature. They feed every interest of the
soul. They strike a responsive chord in every awakening faculty of the
unfolding life. Boys and girls love stories as they love no other form
of address. Stories afford amusement and entertainment as play does,
for they are the mind’s play, as well as its natural soul-food.

Story-telling is as old as human speech. It was enjoyed by the
primitive children of all races and lands, as it is enjoyed by the
boys and girls of to-day. There is no better way to convey our ideas,
to widen knowledge, experience, and sympathy, or to impress moral
truth. Stories with plenty of life and action in them leave nothing to
explain. Conduct pictured in them needs no application or obtrusive
moral. Good stories, well adapted and well told, not only furnish
amusement and hold attention as no other form of speech does, but
possess positive value in many other directions. They feed, exercise,
and cultivate the imagination; appeal to the emotions; arouse the
will; strengthen the power of concentration; develop the sense of
beauty; stimulate the idealizing instinct; help to shape thought and
language; widen the child’s sympathies and fellowships; broaden his
world interests; prepare for future understanding of literary classics,
especially poetry; implant ideas of right and wrong; and, in short,
make the most lasting impressions of an ethical, esthetic, educational,
and cultural nature.

The story method is the golden method of instruction. No method of
teaching is so popular or powerful. The story-teller was the first
teacher of primitive children in Egypt, Assyria, India, China, and
Japan. The stories of the wandering bards, like Homer, in ancient
Greece, were the first education of the Greeks. Stories of national
heroes, such as we find in Plutarch’s Lives, delighted the Roman
boy just as the stories of Joseph and Samuel and David and Daniel
charmed and thrilled to patriotism the Jewish boy. During the Middle
Ages the monks, troubadours, skalds, jongleurs, wandering bards,
and minstrels never lacked an audience when they told or sang their
tales of mystery, heroism, or love. Story-telling has been a valuable
instrument for philosophers, poets, prophets, statesmen, and great
leaders of men in all ages. It was the method of Jesus, the greatest
of all teachers. “Without a parable spake he not unto them.” Plato
regarded stories for children as so important that he would have none
told that had not been approved by the public censor. Froebel, the
father of the kindergarten, said: “Story-telling refreshes the mind as
a bath refreshes the body; it gives exercise to the intellect and its
powers, and tests the judgment and the feelings.” Charles Lamb, Sir
Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Coleridge, Longfellow, Dickens, Emerson,
Lowell, Milton, Hawthorne, Stanley, Hugh Miller, Ruskin, and Wagner
tell of the influence of stories, and especially fairy stories, upon
them before the age of sixteen, and many before they were twelve. When
Henry Ward Beecher arose in Manchester, England, to make an address,
during the Civil War, pleading the cause of the Union before a bitterly
hostile assembly, he looked out upon a howling mob. He smiled, he waved
his hand, he waited in vain. At last he shouted, “Let me tell you a
story!” and at once the tumult ceased. He told them a short, pithy
story in half a dozen sentences, won their attention, and proceeded
with his great plea for human rights. It has been said that Beecher, by
this speech, stemmed the tide of popular feeling against the Union and
so prevented recognition of the Confederacy by the British Government.

All the world loves a good story. But give the story a place in the
heart and mind of childhood early enough, and you have laid the
foundation-stone for an enduring character. And beyond all this, as Dr.
G. Stanley Hall says, “To hear stories from the great story-books of
the world is one of the inalienable rights of childhood.”


STORIES IN THE HOME

Elementary teachers, junior librarians, and competent Sunday-school
teachers are now fully expected to meet the story-hunger of childhood
by good stories. But educated mothers also are coming to realize
that these workers for their children cannot be expected to do all
the story-telling. Parents, and especially mothers, should talk with
their children about the stories they have heard, and supplement these
with the cultural classics, such world stories as are found in this
collection, or with those from other sources.

“The mother’s heart is the child’s best schoolroom.” The home is the
first and holiest school. The home is the institution which is more
important and fundamental than all others. Teachers, ministers, and
other educators can cooperate with, but can never be substitutes for,
educated, cultured parents, who, by the great law of family life,
necessarily exert the most direct influence upon the life of the child,
and especially during its formative and most impressionable years. An
educator of wide reputation says: “If, at the end of the sixth year,
the child has not acquired self-control and a fair ability to be an
agreeable member of society, it is the fault of the home. A failure
to arrive at such a happy state of affairs may be due to economic or
social conditions back of the home, but normally this responsibility
for the care and training of children lies with the parents.”

Because so few mothers feel competent to cooperate in this creative art
of story-telling, such a course should manifestly become an integral
part of the education of every young woman of culture. This is, in
part, being provided, and soon must universally find a place in the
curricula of high schools, normal colleges, State universities, and
denominational institutions of learning. Many who are now mothers have
had no such training. All the greater reason, therefore, that the
mother who would be competent should avail herself of such books as
“Stories and Story-Telling,” by E. P. St. John; “How to Tell Stories
to Children,” by Sara Cone Bryant; “Stories and Story-Telling,” by
Angela M. Keyes; “The Children’s Reading,” by Frances J. Olcott;
“Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them,” by Richard T. Wyche; or
“The Moral Instruction of Children,” by Felix Adler. Any one of these
books, or the present volume alone, will assist any mother to improve
her opportunity of telling stories to her own children or to develop
her own natural gift into a conscious art, so that ability may fit
opportunity more perfectly.

It is well for the mother to have a definite plan for children’s
story-telling. Some mothers I know have set aside half an hour in the
morning after breakfast, when the husband has gone to the office and
her older children have gone to school, as the best time for what they
call “the morning stories of the Bible” (early chapters of Genesis)
for those who are in the early morn of life. Less fortunate mothers
have set aside Sunday afternoons. Others set aside a half-hour after
supper on two or three evenings each week, or even one evening, if that
is all that can be spared. Still others devote, faithfully, one-half
hour to their children’s story-telling before the children go to bed,
or even after they are in bed, and the children love that half-hour as
“the best of all the day.”


THE FATHER AS STORY-TELLER

The instinct of story-telling is, undoubtedly, more natural with the
mother, the children more necessarily turning to her with their cry for
soul-food, “Tell me a story!” But many a father would greatly enrich
his own life and his boy’s childhood memory by less absorption in the
evening paper, the monthly magazine, or the club in order to attend
to this soul-hunger of his boy’s mind. Longfellow, the great lover of
children, had the father as the story-teller in mind, when he pictured
“The Children’s Hour”:

  Between the dark and the daylight,
    When the night is beginning to lower,
  Comes a pause in the day’s occupation,
    That is known as the Children’s Hour.

   *       *       *       *       *

  Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
    Because you have scaled the wall,
  Such an old mustache as I am
    Is not a match for you all!

  I hold you fast in my fortress,
    And will not let you depart,
  But put you down into the dungeon
    In the round-tower of my heart.

  And there will I keep you forever,
    Yes, forever and a day,
  Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
    And moulder in dust away!

Not all fathers are so occupied with business cares that they may
not, if they would, attract their children and strengthen and ennoble
their life by stories. Not a few fathers I have known have left this
priceless heritage and memory to grateful children.

When should parents begin to tell stories to their children? As early
as possible. When should they cease? At no point. Walter T. Field,
in “Finger Posts for Children’s Reading,” tells of a father who read
a course in history with his sons when they were grown into young
manhood. Not the least reason for the father, as well as the mother,
being the story-teller to their own children, is the comradeship of
it. A well-loved writer once said that in his long experience he had
never seen any family of boys go wrong where their father was their
“chum,” if the father was himself the man he ought to be. The father’s
comradeship with his boy or girl begins very early in the child-life,
and the earlier it begins, the deeper and stronger will the roots go
down into the soul. Story-telling during the golden years of childhood
in the home, or as the father walks abroad into the country with his
boy, will weld bonds of friendship between father and son that no after
years can sunder.

Many homes cannot afford a large library of many books, but no home
is so poor that parents in joyous partnership may not gather the
children together on a winter’s evening or summer’s day, and tell them
some of the great stories of the world. To do so is to reenter in
joyous comradeship into the child’s enjoyment, which is the highest
prerogative of a parent. It is in this sense “to become again as a
little child.” And besides all, it is to be rewarded by discovering,
as nearly as can be on this side of heaven, the fount of perennial
youth.


STORIES IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL

Only recently has the value of teaching by stories been taken seriously
in the Sunday-school