And now I will tell you a fairy tale:  to make you understand it at all I must put it in the shape of a tale.  I call it a fairy tale, because it is so strange; indeed I think I ought to call it the fairy tale of all fairy tales, for by the time we get to the end of it I think it will explain to you how our forefathers got to believe in fairies, and trolls, and elves, and scratlings, and all strange little people who were said to haunt the mountains and the caves.

Well, once upon a time, so long ago that no man can tell when, the land was so much higher, that between England and Ireland, and, what is more, between England and Norway, was firm dry land.  The country then must have looked—­at least we know it looked so in Norfolk—­very like what our moors look like here.  There were forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce too, which is not wild in England now, though you may see plenty in every plantation.  There were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there are in our woods now.  There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in Larmer’s and Heath pond; and white and yellow water-lilies, horn-wort, and pond-weeds, just as there are now in our ponds.  There were wild horses, wild deer, and wild oxen, those last of an enormous size.  There were little yellow roe-deer, which will not surprise you, for there are hundreds and thousands in Scotland to this day; and, as you know, they will thrive well enough in our woods now.  There were beavers too:  but that must not surprise you, for there were beavers in South Wales long after the Norman Conquest, and there are beavers still in the mountain glens of the south-east of France.  There were honest little water-rats too, who I dare say sat up on their hind legs like monkeys, nibbling the water-lily pods, thousands of years ago, as they do in our ponds now.  Well, so far we have come to nothing strange:  but now begins the fairy tale.  Mixed with all these animals, there wandered about great herds of elephants and rhinoceroses; not smooth-skinned, mind, but covered with hair and wool, like those which are still found sticking out of the everlasting ice cliffs, at the mouth of the Lena and other Siberian rivers, with the flesh, and skin, and hair so fresh upon them, that the wild wolves tear it off, and snarl and growl over the carcase of monsters who were frozen up thousands of years ago.  And with them, stranger still, were great hippopotamuses; who came, perhaps, northward in summer time along the sea-shore and down the rivers, having spread hither all the way from Africa; for in those days, you must understand, Sicily, and Italy, and Malta—­look at your map—­were joined to the coast of Africa:  and so it may be was the rock of Gibraltar itself; and over the sea where the Straits of Gibraltar now flow was firm dry land, over which hyaenas and leopards, elephants and rhinoceroses ranged into Spain; for their bones are found at this day in the Gibraltar caves.  And this is the first chapter of my fairy tale.