How An Elf Set Up Housekeeping, by Anne Cleve.  This is a good tale of fancy.  An Elf set up housekeeping in a lily and obtained a curtain from a spider, down from a thistle, a stool from a toad who lived in a green house in the wood, etc.

     The Wish-Ring, translated from the German by Anne Eichberg. 
     This is a tale with the implied message that “The best way to
     secure one’s best wish is to work for it.”

The Hop-About Man, by Agnes Herbertson, in Little Folks Magazine, is a very pleasing modern romantic fairy tale for little children.  Wee Wun was a gnome who lived in the Bye-Bye meadow in a fine new house which he loved.  As he flew across the Meadow he had his pockets full of blue blow-away seeds.  In the Meadow he found a pair of shoes, of blue and silver, and of course he took them home to his new house.  But first he scattered the blue blow-away seeds over the garden wall in the Stir-About-Wife’s garden where golden dandelions grew.  And the seeds grew and crowded out the dandelions.  Next day Wee Wun found a large blue seed which he planted outside his house; and on the following morning a great blue blow-away which had grown in a night, made his house dark.  So he went to the Green Ogre to get him to take it away.  When he came home he found, sitting in his chair, the Hop-About-Man, who had come to live with him.  He had been forewarned of this coming by the little blue shoes when they hopped round the room singing:—­

          Ring-a-ding-dill, ring-a-ding-dill,
          The Hop-About-Man comes over the hill. 
          Why is he coming, and what will he see? 
          Rickety, rackety,—­one, two, three.

The story then describes Wee Wun’s troubles with the Hop-About-Man, who remained an unwelcome inhabitant of the house where Wee Wun liked to sit all alone.  The Hop-About-Man made everything keep hopping about until Wee Wun would put all careless things straight, and until he would give back to him his blue-and-silver shoes.  One day, Wee Wun became a careful housekeeper and weeded out of the dandelion garden all the blue blow-away plants that grew from the seeds he had scattered there in the Stir-About-Wife’s garden, and when he came home his troubles were over, and the Hop-About-Man was gone.

Perhaps one reason for the frequent failure of the modern fairy tale is that it fails to keep in harmony with the times.  Just as the modern novel has progressed from the romanticism of Hawthorne, the realism of Thackeray, through the psychology of George Eliot, and the philosophy of George Meredith, so the little child’s story—­which like the adult story is an expression of the spirit of the times—­must recognize these modern tendencies.  It must learn, from Alice in Wonderland and from A Child’s Garden of Verses, that the modern fairy tale is not a Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but the modern fairy tale is the child’s mind.  The real fairy world is the strangeness and beauty of the child mind’s point of view.  It is the duty and privilege of the modern fairy tale to interpret the child’s psychology and to present the child’s philosophy of life.