Before they are asked to study it, if the story of the Acadian girl is told sympathetically and feelingly they are touched by its pathos and fired by the idealism of its characters, and they feel the charm of life in the quaint old village of Grand Pré. If, before they are told to read it, they have gone with the heroine through the magic of the narrator’s picturing, in her wanderings over mountain and lowland, into Indian camp and sequestered mission, living among strange peoples and sleeping by strange fires, they will read it with enthusiasm. It will become a joy instead of a burden, because they will have felt something of what was in the heart of the poet who wrote it, and not merely what appeared on the printed page.
Besides the main thread of the story, there are many sub-stories that, if told in connection with the poem, will add to the child’s enjoyment and understanding of it. Sometimes a name is rich in story material, yet often it is passed over with nothing more than a definition found in the pronouncing gazetteer, and a golden opportunity is lost.
Take, for instance, the line, “Now in the Tents of Grace of the gentle Moravian missions.” There is a footnote in most editions stating, “This refers to the Moravian mission of Gnädenhütten.” But what does that signify to children, since there were many missions in those early days? But if they are told of how the Moravians came from the distant German mountains to plant the tree of their faith in the Western wilds, they grow interested. They are fascinated as the tale goes on, picturing how these simple folk founded a mission in the woods of Ohio, which they named “Gnädenhütten” or “Tents of Grace,” and telling how a massacre occurred there in 1790, not savages killing off whites, but a band of marauding British troops slaughtering Christianized Indians as they toiled peacefully in their cornfields. Then, as Evangeline roams over the Southwest, into the bayou country of Louisiana, if pictures of the early life there are painted vividly by the story-teller, if she gives some of the events of old Creole days, the children will look forward to the _Evangeline_ period.
This same method will add enjoyment to the study of other pieces of literature. _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, aside from the main plot, is rich in stories from the Bible. The children should look up these allusions, but the teacher should put life into them by giving the story. In fact, there is no piece of literature studied below the high school, or even during the early part of the high-school course, that cannot be presented with splendid results through the story-telling method. The concrete precedes the abstract in the order in which selections are considered, those through which a story thread runs being given in advance of the essay or treatise. By making the most of this story thread, literature study will become pleasurable and bring splendid response from the children. It requires effort and preparation, but it pays. It is worth much to the teacher who loves good literature, to look back over the years and think of the children she has led to appreciate and enjoy it. It is a tremendous satisfaction to have boys come back long after leaving her schoolroom and seek her out, because through her they learned to know something of the comfort that is to be found in good old books. One teacher, speaking of her experience, said: “It made all the effort seem richly worth while, when a broad-shouldered, sun-burned man went three hundred miles out of his way to see me on a home visit to America, and thank me for having led him to enjoy poetry.” As a boy he became intensely interested in _The Lady of the Lake_ because his teacher gave the stories of Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu and of the clan life of the Highlands, and a pocket edition of Scott was a source of comfort to him during a surveying expedition in the wilds of West Australia, and took away the loneliness of nights spent by a camp fire with no companions save the native woodmen. He had learned to know Scott during his boyhood, and the capacity for enjoyment acquired through that association was a priceless possession to the man. If more teachers realized that story-telling is a direct road to the understanding of literature, and that it has its place in grammar and high-school grades as much as in the kindergarten, there would be less drudgery for them and more satisfying results.
