Produced by E. Barry Simpson, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
[Illustration: "AT LAST WE CAN SEE SOMETHING IN THE FIRE."]
To
Helen Krebbier
There is a certain little girl who sometimes tries to find out when Iam not over busy, so that she may ask me to tell her a story. She iskind enough to say that she likes my stories, and this so flatters myvanity that I like nothing better than telling them to her. One reasonwhy she likes them, I suspect, is that they are not really my storiesat all, the most of them. They are the stories that the whole world hasknown and loved all these hundreds and thousands of years, tales of thegods and the heroes, of the giants and the goblins. Those are the rightstories to tell to children, I believe, and the right ones for childrento hear—the wonderful things that used to be done, up in the sky, anddown under the ocean, and inside the mountains. If the boys and girlsdo not find out now, while they are young, all about the strange,mysterious, magical life of the days when the whole world was young, itis ten to one that they will never find out about it at all, for themost of us do not keep ourselves like children always, though surely wehave all been told plainly enough that that is what we ought to do.
This little girl's mother is rather a strange sort of woman. I do notknow that she exactly disagrees with us about these stories that weboth like so much, but she seems to have a different way of looking atthem from ours. I sometimes suspect that she does not even believe infairies at all, that she never so much as thought she saw a ghost,that, if she heard a dozen wild horses galloping over the roof of thehouse and then flying away into the sky, she would think it was onlythe wind, and that she is no more afraid of ogres than of policemen.Still she is a woman whom one cannot help liking, in some respects.
But one day she said something to the little girl that surprised me,and made me think t