A mother’s heart is like the sun—­no matter how much light it diffuses, its warmth and brilliancy never lessen; and though so lavish a flood of tenderness was poured forth on me, the other children were no losers.  But I was the youngest, the comforter, the nestling; and never was the fact of so much benefit to me as at that time.

My parents’ bed stood in the green room with the bright carpet.  It had been brought from Holland, and was far larger and wider than bedsteads of the present day.  My mother had kept it.  A quilted silk coverlet was spread over it, which felt exquisitely soft, and beneath which one could rest delightfully.  When the time for rising came, my mother called me.  I climbed joyfully into her warm bed, and she drew her darling into her arms, played all sorts of pranks with him, and never did I listen to more beautiful fairy tales than at those hours.  They became instinct with life to me, and have always remained so; for my mother gave them the form of dramas, in which I was permitted to be an actor.

The best one of all was Little Red Riding Hood.  I played the little girl who goes into the wood, and she was the wolf.  When the wicked beast had disguised itself in the grandmother’s cap I not only asked the regulation questions:  “Grandmother, what makes you have such big eyes?  Grandmother, why is your skin so rough?” etc., but invented new ones to defer the grand final effect, which followed the words, “Grandmother, why do you have such big, sharp teeth?” and the answer, “So that I can eat you,” whereupon the wolf sprang on me and devoured me—­with kisses.

Another time I was Snow-White and she the wicked step-mother, and also the hunter, the dwarf, and the handsome prince who married her.

How real this merry sport made the distress of persecuted innocence, the terrors and charm of the forest, the joys and splendours of the fairy realm!  If the flowers in the garden had raised their voices in song, if the birds on the boughs had called and spoken to me—­nay, if a tree had changed into a beautiful fairy, or the toad in the damp path of our shaded avenue into a witch—­it would have seemed only natural.

It is a singular thing that actual events which happened in those early days have largely vanished from my memory; but the fairy tales I heard and secretly experienced became firmly impressed on my mind.  Education and life provided for my familiarity with reality in all its harshness and angles, its strains and hurts; but who in later years could have flung wide the gates of the kingdom where everything is beautiful and good, and where ugliness is as surely doomed to destruction as evil to punishment?  Even poesy in our times turns from the Castalian fount whose crystal-clear water becomes an unclean pool and, though reluctantly, obeys the impulse to make its abode in the dust of reality.  Therefore I plead with voice and pen in behalf of fairy tales; therefore I tell them to my children and grandchildren, and have even written a volume of them myself.