t-cushion
ever below their hand, and the fear of the Ordinary before their
eyes.[3] Grimm and his friends, on the other hand, took it too
lightly, seeing in it matter for a treatise on language. I got no good
out of either school, and as time goes on I don't see a prospect of
any adequate handling of the theme. I should like to think that I
myself was to be the man to expound the fairy-kind candidly and
methodically--candidly, that is, without going to literature for my
data, and with the notion definitely out of mind that the fairy
God-mother ever existed. But I shall never be that man, for though I
am candid to the point of weakness, I am not to flatter myself that I
have method. But to whomsoever he may be that undertakes the subject I
can promise that the documents await their historian, and I will
furnish him with a title which will indicate at a glance both the
spirit of his attack and the nature of his treatise.

[Footnote 3: The Reverend Robert Kirk, author of the _Secret
Commonwealth_, was a clergyman and a believer in the beings of whom
his book professed to treat. He found them a place in his Pantheon;
but he knew very little about them. I shall have to speak of him again
I expect. He is himself an object-lesson, though his teachings are
naught.]

"The Natural History of the Praeternatural" it should be. I make him a
present of that--the only possible line for a sincere student. God go
with him whosoever he be, for he will have rare qualities and rare
need of them. He must be cheerful without assumption, respectful
without tragic airs, as respectable as he please in the eyes of his
own law, so that he finds respect in his heart also for the laws of
the realm in which he is privileged to trade. Let him not stand, as
the priest in the Orthodox Church, a looming hierophant. Let him avoid
any rhetorical pose, any hint of the grand manner. Above all, let him
not wear the smirk of the conjuror when he prepares with flourishes to
whip the handkerchief away from his guinea-pig. Here is one who
condescends to reader and subject alike. He would do harm all round:
moreover he would be a quack, for he is just as much of a quack who
makes little of much as he who makes much of little. No! Let his
attitude be that of the contadino in some vast church in Italy, who
walking into the cool dark gazes round-eyed at the twinkling candles
ahead of him in the vague, and that he may recover himself a little
leans against a pilla