It does not so greatly trouble the teacher who uses the nature story as a
story, rather than as a text-book, for she will not be so keenly attracted
toward the books prepared with a didactic purpose. She will find a good
gift for the child in nature stories which are stories, over and above any
stimulus to his curiosity about fact. That good gift is a certain
possession of all good fiction.
One of the best things good fiction does for any of us is to broaden our
comprehension of other lots than our own. The average man or woman has
little opportunity actually to live more than one kind of life. The
chances of birth, occupation, family ties, determine for most of us a line
of experience not very inclusive and but little varied; and this is a
natural barrier to our complete understanding of others, whose life-line
is set at a different angle. It is not possible wholly to sympathise with
emotions engendered by experience which one has never had. Yet we all long
to be broad in sympathy and inclusive in appreciation; we long, greatly,
to know the experience of others. This yearning is probably one of the
good but misconceived appetites so injudiciously fed by the gossip of the
daily press. There is a hope, in the reader, of getting for the moment
into the lives of people who move in wholly different sets of
circumstances.
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