ng knowledge and
responsibility compel. We cannot omit the adventures of fairyland from
our educational program. They are too well adapted to the restless,
active, and unrestrained life of childhood. They take the objects
which little boys and girls know vividly and personify them so that
instinctive hopes and fears may play and be disciplined.

While the fairy tales have no immediate purpose other than to amuse,
they leave a substantial by-product which has a moral significance. In
every reaction which the child has for distress or humor in the tale,
he deposits another layer of vicarious experience which sets his
character more firmly in the mould of right or wrong attitude. Every
sympathy, every aversion helps to set the impulsive currents of his
life, and to give direction to his personality.

Because of the important aesthetic and ethical bearings of this form
of literary experience, the fairy stories must be rightly chosen and
artfully told. In no other way can their full worth in education be
realized. They are tools which require discrimination and skill. Out
of the wisdom of one who knows both tales and children, and who holds
a thoughtful grasp on educational purpose, we offer this volume of
unusually helpful counsel.--HENRY SUZZALLO.

CHAPTER I

THE WORTH OF FAIRY TALES

In olde dayes of the kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour,
Al was this lond fulfilled of fayrie;
The elf-queen, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful oft in many a grene mede.--CHAUCER.

I. TWO PUBLIC TRIBUTES

Only a few years ago, in the gardens of the Tuileries, in Paris, a
statue was erected in memory of Charles Perrault, to be placed there
among the sculptures of the never-to-be-forgotten fairy tales he had
created,--_Red Riding Hood_, _Sleeping Beauty_, _Puss-in-Boots_,
_Hop-o'-my-Thumb_, _Bluebeard_, and the rest,--so that the children
who roamed the gardens, and in their play gathered about the statues
of their beloved fairy friends, might have with them also a reminder
of the giver of all this joy, their friend Perrault. Two hundred years
before, Perrault truly had been their friend, not only in making for
them fairy tales, but in successfully pleading in their behalf when he
said, "I am persuaded that the gardens of the King were made so great
and spacious that all the children may walk in them."

Only in December, 1913, in Berlin, was completed the _Maerchen