THE PRINCESS AND FROGGIE

The editors call these ""stories for babies"" and indeed there is very little plot to muddle an undeveloped mind. All three concern the same princess and her pet frog--though as might be expected, Margot Zemach shows us a very unregal-looking child, and makes her mother, the queen, a frumpy housewife in brown stockings and a flowered apron. (Perhaps it doesn't matter that the humor of this, as well as the echoes of a Grimmer tale in the first episode where the princess drops her ball into the pond and Froggie fetches it for her, will escape the intended audience.) All three stories also end similarly, with lollipops. In the first, Froggie is rewarded with one for retrieving the ball; in the second, the princess loses her penny change from buying the queen an apple but Froggie finds that too, and they spend it on lollipops at two for a penny; and in the third a bird comes and sits on the king's head. ""The king said: 'Princess, please get this bird off my head.'"" But each time she climbs up and shoos it away, the bird returns as soon as she's down. . . until (you guessed it) Froggie chases it away for good and the king gives them each a lollipop. This last is by far the most fun of the three, and probably worth the price even if Margot Zemach's frog were not such a charming and debonair cutup.