[Footnote 21:  This version is probably a mixture of the versions of Perrault and Grimm but Mother Holle shaking her feathers is worth bringing in.]

Fairy- and folk-tales give wholesome food to the desire for adventure, whereas in what we may call realistic stories, adventure is chiefly confined to the naughty child, who is therefore more attractive than the good and stodgy.  Even among fairy-tales we may select.  “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow-white and Rose-red” are distinctly preferable to “Jack the Giant Killer” or “Puss in Boots,” while “Bluebeard” cannot be told.  It seems to me that children can often safely read for themselves stories the adult cannot well tell.  The child’s notion of justice is crude, bad is bad, and whether embodied in an ogre or in Pharaoh of Egypt, it must be got rid of, put out of the story.  No child is sorry for the giant when Jack’s axe cleaves the beanstalk, and as for Pharaoh, “Well, it’s a good thing he’s drowned, for he was a bad man, wasn’t he?” Death means nothing to children, as a rule, except disappearance.  When children can read for themselves, they will take from their stories what suits their stage of development, their standard of judgement, and we need not interfere, even though they regard with perfect calm what seems gruesome to the adult.

As a valuable addition to the best-known fairy-tales, we may mention one or two others:  Grannie’s Wonderful Chair is a delightful set of stories, full of charming pictures, though the writer, Frances Brown, was born blind.  Mrs. Ewing’s stories for children, The Brownies, with Amelia and the Dwarfs and Timothy’s Shoes, are inimitable, and her Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales are very good, but not for very young children.  Her other stories are certainly about children, but are, as a rule, written for adults.

George Macdonald’s stories are all too well known and too universally beloved to need recommendation.  But in telling them, e.g. “The Princess and the Goblins” or “At the Back of the North Wind,” the young teacher must remember that they are beautiful allegories.  Before she ventures to tell them, the beginner should ponder well what the poet—­for these are prose poems—­means, and who is represented by the beautiful Great-great-grandmother always old and always young, or “North Wind” who must sink the ship but is able to bear the cry from it, because of the sound of a far-off song, which seems to swallow up all fear and pain and to set the suffering “singing it with the rest.”

Water-Babies is a bridge between the fairy-tale of a child and equally wonderful and beautiful fairy-tales of Nature, and it, too, is full of meaning.  If the teacher has gained this, the children will not lag behind.  It was a child of backward development, who, when she heard of Mother Carey, “who made things make themselves,” said, “Oh!  I know who that was, that was God.”