Story hour

“ We break down instead of building up the powers of concentration of our children.
Planning a group of stories for one story hour is quite as much a matter to be studied as is the selection of each individual story in the group and preparing this story for telling. The story combination selected by the story teller must have the qualities of cohesion, unity of theme, and related interests to make the story hour valuable in the child’s life. On the other hand, the unity of theme in the separate stories chosen must be emphasized by contrasting story treatment of this central theme. ”

“ The publisher has no apology to offer for adopting so excellent a title, but does disavow any intention, inclination or necessity for “borrowing” for this or any other literary purpose. The Story Hour magazine is for the benefit of a worthy educational movement—for the good of children—and there is room for both it and the book of the same name to be a blessing to the rising generation. In doing good, time and priority are not factors, but the will and the deed. ”

“ This plan of out-door story-telling combines the benefits of the usual vacation activities with the legitimate good of the story hour as conducted in our libraries during the winter months.
Stories of industry, and of the development of a given line of commerce or manufacture are full of interest for boys especially. These may be told in connection with the leading business interests of the city or community in which the stories are given.
Every state, every city, affords story material which may be so cast as to rival the [88] wonders of Aladdin’s lamp. ”

“ Mothers are becoming interested in the new story-telling as a means of home education and even discipline. They are making inquires as to methods and materials. The Story Hour will be a helpful counsellor for them.
A Query Page will be useful to many, especially to those who live remote from the cities and their large libraries. Any who desire information of any kind regarding stories, or the literature of stories, or anything at all related to the subject of story-telling, or the League movement may feel free to write to The Story Hour. ”

“ There need be no apology for the story hour. A good story well told makes for pleasure, makes for morals, makes for intellectual growth. Most librarians defend it on the ground that the telling of the story leads to the reading of books on related topics. ”

“ We lead the child from one story interest to another with slight attention to the influence which the story group will have upon the minds of the children. We tell, perhaps, a home story, then a nature story, and last of all a holiday story in one story hour, and in doing this we so quickly transfer the child’s attention from one theme to a distinctly different one that there is no cohesion [246] in our story building. ”

“ More English fairy tales.
Tappan. Old ballads in prose.
[50]
STORIES FOR OLDER CHILDREN.
The cycle story hours in the St. Louis Public Library are planned to interest older boys and girls in great works of literature and to inspire them to read along one line for several weeks or months. Stories in a series are told at a definite hour each week to encourage regular attendance. However, each story is complete in itself and any boys and girls of nine years and more are invited to attend whether or not they are registered borrowers of books. ”

“ The following programs for story hours for the little children are suggestive only. It is desirable that the best folk tales be repeated as often as the children desire, and that poems should be read or recited in connection with the stories where there is a response. The little children should never be held longer than half an hour, and twenty minutes is better. ”

“ The story is written to impress the people, with their great responsibilities in these wonderful days—when a century of incident is crowded into a month, when an hour contains sixty minutes of tremendous possibilities, when each of us should live the minutes, hours, days and weeks with every fibre strained to give the best that is in us to help in the present stupendous struggle for the defence of civilisation. ”

“ It seemed as if it ought by rights to be mid-day, when the sun had only been up for an hour or two, and it was difficult to understand how other people could be quietly waking up to their every-day business. ”

“ Shepherds and country people can tell the hour of night by the feel of the air. So perhaps very sensitive people can tell the century by much the same means. These, of course, would be the people to whom adventures in times past or present would be likely to happen. We must always consider what is likely, especially when we are reading stories about unusual things. ”

“ The morning is not the time for inventive work. An article may be polished then, or a half-finished story completed, but 11 A.M. is not the hour at which to invent.
Jerry Garnet wandered restlessly about his sitting room. ”

“ Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. ”

“ So the long hours of the night went slowly past, and he longed, as a change or relief, for morning. "Poor fools that we are!" says a writer; "our hours are in time so few, and yet we forever wish them shorter, and fling them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken toys." ”

“ But the teacher may say, “Story-telling time means precisely eleven-fifteen on Tuesday morning; [36] the individual teacher has nothing to say about it.” The thing to do, then, is to induce the story-telling mood at eleven-fifteen Tuesday morning. What we should urge here between ourselves is the obligation to give place heartily at this time to the story. No matter how ill things may have gone and how cross we ourselves may have become, we must now let pleasurable anticipation take possession of the classroom.
(2) The story-teller’s part. ”

“ Even if a long life lies before us, let us consider that thirty-five years is high noon with us,—the meridian of that arc which comprehends but threescore years and ten!
But we may be more vividly impressed with the fact of the brevity of life, if we adopt some criterion wider than these familiar measurements. The narrative, the story, engages our ears, in the pauses of care and labor. We listen to it in the noonday rest, and around the evening fire. It is a slight break in the monotony of our business,—an interlude in the solemn march of life. And thus, in some respects, is life itself. ”

“ In the glare and clamour of the noonday, as in the darkness and silence of the night, the mysteries arise, sometimes to startle the world, sometimes to attract so little attention that the story of them never reaches the public ear. ”

“ At such an hour one cannot choose a book from the shelves haphazardly and allow it to evoke its own particular series of emotions. The book must suit the mood, must fit it as the words of a song fit the accompaniment. The varied incidents of the day, the people we have seen and spoken to, the words we have written and read, have created little by little the nature and intensity of the state of mind that is upon us at this late hour. ”

“ Though these traditionary tales are very generally known, there are of course some [vii] persons who can relate them much better than others. The best narrators are almost invariably ancient dames, and the time chosen for story telling is always the evening. This is perhaps not so much on account of the evening being the most convenient time, as because such tales as these have most effect when told to an assemblage gathered round a fire circle, when night has spread her mantle over the earth, and when the belief in the supernatural is stronger than it is by day. ”

“ Sometimes the morning of a day would pass in looking through the reviews and criticisms of the favourite novel of the hour, the afternoon in reading the book itself and forming a judgment of it, and then an evening of sickly irritation would follow, in which, pacing backwards and forwards, in the empty study, I had to admit that the author, no more gifted, no more favoured with talent than myself, had been successful and I had not. ”

“ The main difficulty, however, is to erase the popular impression that the 'Nights' is a book for babies, a 'classic for children;' whereas its lofty morality, its fine character-painting, its artful development of the story, and its original snatches of rare poetry, fit it for the reading of men and women, and these, too, of no puerile or vulgar wit. ”

“ What a natural and touching thought, then, to associate a holy memory with the hour that links day with night!—the hour of twilight, when the dazzling sunlight is fading away, work is suspended, and propitious leisure brings on long, sweet, and sometimes dangerous reveries! ”

“ How many hours of the human day had gone by? Had mankind, starting from its cradle over yonder at daybreak, strewing its road with ruins from stage to stage, now accomplished one-half of its day and reached the dazzling hour of noon? ”

“ The 190Times, the Morning Chronicle, and the Herald are necessary to their existence: in them ‘they live and move and have their being.’ The Evening Paper is impatiently expected, and called for at a certain critical minute: the news of the morning become stale and vapid by the dinner-hour. ”

“ Four ways there are of telling a curious world that endless story of the past which it is never tired of hearing. History, memoir, biography, and the diary run back like four smooth roads, connecting our century, our land, our life, with other centuries and lands and lives that have all served in turn to make us what we are. ”

“ All these records have [561] their value for late readers in their honesty and minuteness. It is on such revelations that we depend for our correct conception of by-gone affairs.
A diary or a journal, then, is first of all a narrative of real events. Fiction in this form, like Defoe's "Journal of the Plague" or the diary parts of Charles Reade's "Cloister and the Hearth," is so for the sake of the verisimilitude. ”

“ But in the last week all the thoughts, the plans, the ambitions, the discoveries of a new future, seem to be concentrated. The minutes drag by with a laborious and torpid slowness, and there is an intensity of time which seems to crowd sixty hours into one single hour by the clock. ”

“ In accordance with the principle of emphasis at the beginning of the paragraph, the “feature” of the story should be placed in the first group of words of the opening sentence of the lead. Although any of the essential points may be “played up,” some are less likely than others to deserve that emphasis. The time of the event, for example, is generally not a significant point in the story, and therefore stories should seldom begin with “Early this morning,” “At two o’clock this afternoon,” “Yesterday,” or similar unimportant phrases. ”

“ Intimate facts are to be expected. The ambitions, hopes, defeats, expenditures, future plans, of the city or state, are mentioned perhaps, as are also, maybe, its success and honor—in the carrying out of a town fiesta or county fair, or in being host to some distinguished visitor or to a session of some large political party. The essential element of this kind of narrative history is the yearly periods, though the term "annals" has been loosely used in modern literature to signify almost any temporal order. ”

“ As a rational person, one may debonairly consider The Certain Hour possesses as large license to look like a volume of short stories as, say, a backgammon-board has to its customary guise of a two-volume history; but as an average-novel-reader, one must vote otherwise. ”

“ Time was when all honest burghers were night-capped and somnolent at an early hour, and the silent streets knew naught but the echoing tread of the watchman who swung his lantern down the lonesome ways and started at his own loud cry of “All’s Well.” But modern ideas have almost turned the night into day. While we slumber at home, hundreds are toiling that we may have our comforts in the morning. ”

“ It is accorded, and of necessity, by the people in a drama: how necessary is it in a novel?
Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died," is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. ”

“ Stories fitted to the holiday seasons, and the out-door stories of vacation time are always a source of delight to both story-teller and listeners. Each holiday has its quota of timely stories; and by no other means can the spirit and the lesson of a special day or season be more vividly impressed upon a child’s mind than by a well-chosen, well-told story. ”

“ I fancied I could have easily hit upon some appropriate and becoming pastime. A theatre,—there was one in the “Lower Town,”—and a tavern afterwards, would have filled the interval before it was time to go to bed. “Time to go to bed! “—strange phrase, born of a thousand and one conventionalities. For some, that time comes when the sun has set, and with its last beams of rosy light reminds labor of the coming morrow. To some, it is the hour when wearied faculties can do no more, when tired intellect falters “by the way,” and cannot keep the “line of march.” ”

“ No writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the hour of satiety with the things of life,—the hour in which we say, "I take no pleasure in them,"—or from the hour of terror at the world's vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come. ”

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

“ The truth is, I am not living as a man who keeps a diary should live. I ought, of course, to sit down in front of this diary at eleven o’clock at night, and write down all that has occurred to me during the day. But at eleven o’clock at night, I am in the middle of a long railway journey, or have just got up, or am just going to bed for a couple of hours. We go to bed at odd moments, when we happen to come across a bed, and have a few minutes to spare. We have been to bed this afternoon, and are now having another breakfast ”