I am going to tell you a story about when I went to Falmouth with my mother. We had to go all night on the train and this is the way it sounded, (moving her hand on the table and intoning in different keys) thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, _NEW ARK!_ thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, FALMOUTH! And then we got off and we took a trolley car and the trolley car went clipperty, clipperty, clipperty, zip, zip. And another trolley car came in the other direction (again with hands) and one came along saying clipperty, clipperty, clipperty, zip, zip and the other came along saying clipperty, clipperty, clipperty, zip, zip, zip, BANG! And they hit in the middle and they got stuck and they tried to pull them apart and they stuck and they stuck and they stuck and finally they got them apart and then we went again. And when we got off we had to take a subway and the subway went rockety-rockety-rockety-rock. You know a subway makes a terrible noise! It made a _terrible_ noise it sounded like rockety-rockety-rockety-rockety-rock.
And at last we got there and when we came up in the streets of Falmouth it was so still that I didn't know what to do. You know the streets of Falmouth are just so terribly quiet and then we had to walk millions and millions of miles almost to get to our little cottage. And when we got there I put on my bathing suit and I went in bathing and I shivered just like this because it was a rainy day, the day I went to Falmouth with my mother.
O brook, O brook, that sings so loud, O brook, O brook, that goes all day, O brook, O brook, that goes all night And forever. Splashes and waves, girls and boys are playing with You and in you. Some with shoes off and some with shoes on, And some are crying because they fell in you. O brook, O brook, have you an end ever? Or do you go forever?
Technically in all these stories the child exemplifies the two rules. He attends to but one thing at a time. And his steps from one point to the next are short and clear.
When we look at the forms which have been presented to children with these their spontaneous patterns fresh in mind, we can see, I think, why Mother Goose has been taken as a child's own and Eugene Field and even Stevenson rejected as unintelligible. I do not believe there is anything in the content of Mother Goose to win the child. I believe it is the form that makes the appeal. Vachel Lindsay, whose daring play with words has made him an object of suspicion to the reluctant of mind, has given us one poem in pattern singularly like the children's own and in content full of interest and charm. Again I give examples as the quickest of arguments. And I give them in verse where the form is more obvious and can be shown in briefer space than in stories.