rden 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.

REFERENCES

Century Co.: _St. Nicholas Magazine_, 1915; _St. Nicholas Fairy
Stories Re-told_.

Gates, Josephine: "And Piped Those Children Back Again," (Pied