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.

How perverse and unjust it is to banish the fairy tale from the life of
the child, because devotion to its charm might prove detrimental to the
grown person! Has not the former the same claim to consideration as the
latter?

Every child is entitled to expect a different treatment and judgment,
and to receive what is his due undiminished. Therefore it is unjust to
injure and rob the child for the benefit of the man. Are we even sure
that the boy is destined to attain the second and third stages--youth
and manhood?

True, there are some apostles of caution who deny themselves every joy
of existence while in their prime, in order, when their locks are grey,
to possess wealth which frequently benefits only their heirs.

All sensible mothers will doubtless, like ours, take care that their
children do not believe the stories which they tell them to be true.
I do not remember any time when, if my mind had been called upon to
decide, I should have thought that anything I invented myself had really
happened; but I know that we were