sting of the recognition of its truth. And to pay eleven pounds seven without his grim little mother's permission was as impossible as if the sun had been twenty times as great. He dare not trust himself to speak, but in spite of Marster Tibbitts's prohibition, and under Marster Tibbitts's very nose he drew Marj'y to him, bent his closecurled yellow head and kissed her.

Marj'y preceded her grandf'er into the cottage in a whirlwind of mingled ecstasy and despair. The remembrance of Bob's kiss thrilled her with blissful certainty one moment, the recollection of her grandf'er's brutality shook the foundations of her faith to their centre the next. Could any love survive such handling? Would any lover risk a second reception like unto the first?

"Oh," said Marj'y in the depths of her smarting heart, "I'll get away, right away! "Tes all I can du, now."

With trembling hands she lit the candle on the cottage table, it was hard that this royal day should have so bitter an ending. Its rays flickered over the little figure in its cloud of blue, and old Tibbitts's eyes softened at the sight.

"Oah," he said slowly, "so you gat the gown a'ter all?"

"Yas," and the sharpness of her pain and the depth of her resentment at its cause stinging her to rebellion, for the first time in all her seventeen years, she added, "an' no thanks to you, grandf'er!"

"He, he, he!" chuckled the old man much amused, "gowns be easy ti come by, seeams so, annyway! "Tes well fur such as Oi. Oi'm thinkin' you best git your next gown saame waay you gat this'n!"

But this was adding insult to injury with a vengeance. Marj'y flashed round at him.

"I'll git my next gown myself!" she said. "I'll go ti sarvice, so I will. I'd 'arn ten pound a year at sarvice, Mrs.

Joyce up at Oatlands sed so. An' I'll

go, I will.”

"An' what about Brunsell?"

"I'll nivver see him no more!" with heart-wrung certainty. "He'll not come here, grandf'er, ti be taalked to -that waay!" And Marj'y watered the grave of her hopes with her tears. The old man's face changed. He had meant to test the young man's love, but not to destroy it. And then the threatened loss looming before him and big with catastrophe woke a cry in his own heart that demanded words. "An' what'll Oi du 'thout 'ee, Marj'y?"

Marj'y did not answer, for the moment she did not care. The old man waited a little and then went slowly out into the dewy scented night. He unlocked the outhouse, silencing the disturbed ruffle of the sleeping hens with a sharp "hish now," and acknowledging Rover's thrusting nose with a pat. Then he stood a moment with a stricken look in his blue eyes it would have been well had Marj'y seen.

"Oi'd no call ti goa too fur," he said. Even when he passed her again as he went indoors Marj'y did not speak. The nightingales sang full-throated in the swampy patch of willows below the little cottage garden, where the spotted orchid raised its puce-colored spires in hundreds, and where lived "they dratted sparrers," who flirted scornful tails at the old man's elaborate arrangements of black cotton and triumphantly ate all his peas every spring. The moonlight powdered the garden path and turned the dewy meadow beyond to a sheet of silver, and Marj'y stood in the cottage door and nursed her anger and her grief, unseeing.

But the heart that beat beneath the "bodice blue" was a tender one and compunction an early visitor. Perhaps, also, the unwonted stirring of the springs of her consciousness that

day, deepened her comprehension not only of the outer but also of the inner things of life. It struck her, as her grandf'er passed her, that he looked very feeble, very old, and perhaps some dim suspicion that he was less unfeeling than he seemed dawned upon her mind too.

"Poor grandf'er! I'll not leave him, I'll never leave him, he knows I'd never," and the resolution, as Marj'y was comforted to remember afterwards, was tainted by no thought of Bob. "I'll tell him so-marnin'."

But for some of us our last morning has dawned upon our conscious eyes, and we have not known it. In the morning Tibbitts was alive, and that was all.

"He is very old and he has had a hard life," said the village doctor. "It might have come at any time. He won't live twenty-four hours."

A hard life! Yes. Up at three every morning and to bed at eight every night for sixty odd years of honest, faithful, uncomplaining service, adequately rewarded, to his thinking, by fifteen shillings a week and his cottage -and this was the end.

The news brought Bob over from the solid reposeful-looking house of red brick that, behind a stone wall with picturesque tiled coping and handsome iron gate, stood in the village street, almost opposite. Perhaps he would have come in any case, but Marj'y was never sure. Together they waited for the end. It was a merciful death, painless and quick, sweeping away with a tender hand that pathetic dread of the independent poor lest they should live "to be a burden." Together, Marj'y's tearwet cheek like a rosebud heavy with dew against the sunbronze of Bob's, they puzzled over the cryptic scroll sewn up in wash-leather, which a tearful "going through his pockets" revealed. "Outhouse.

Twenty-seven

bricks

from north end, fifteen up. Second beam. For Marj'y."

Bob found it; an unfruitful treasure, barren of all save satisfaction, which is, perhaps, enough. Shillings, bearing William's head and new, pounds piled up out of who knows what of painful saving, fifty and more, all told, and at the bottom a folded paper, being a quittance in full of that rankling old debt of eleven pounds seven, "fur rick thatching an' extrys gen'ally."

Bob stared at it with wistful regret; stamp, signature, all were there, and at the back the legend in a shaky scrawl-"Fur Marj'y's sake." The old man had done what he could.

"I allus meant to pay it," he said slowly, but Marj'y could say nothing for tears.

It would be well if all testamentary bequests did as much as the testators hope for. In Tibbitts's case they did more, for they even inclined Bob's grim little mother to look with something approaching resignation on his choice, since Marj'y with a dower of over sixty pounds was a very different person from Marj'y with no dower at all. That her grandf'er's self-denial had done more for her than he could ever have hoped was dimly felt by Marj'y, and she tried to convey the fact and her gratitude to Mist'ess Wilsden.

""Tes well you see it at last," said that comely dame, with a touch of sharpness, "fur you never did see your grandf'er as you should before! But there, I can't blame you, childer never do. But he pinched hisself and stinted beer an' bacca' and screwed and toiled for you, Marj'y, as nivver you'd 'a' thowt. Why, that very gown you went to Tamfield Fair in he paid for. There's no harm in tellin' now. 1 didn't want to cheat you over it an' take thanks I'd no right to, but he med me."

"But why didn't he tell me?" inquired Marj’y, with trembling lips. "Nay," said Mary, as helpless before Temple Bar.

the puzzle as Marj'y was herself, "it wer' just Tibbitts's way."

Stella M. Düring.

Keep a fairy or two for your children. -Ruskin.

A deeper import Lurks in the legend told my youthful

years

Than lie upon the truth, we live to learn.-Coleridge.

The old Florentines of the Middle Ages had a noble conception of the uses of literature in the training of painters as well as children. "And to the old painter," writes Ruskin, "with his wild, weird, mysterious Etruscan instincts and ancestors, literature meant the Bible, legend, poetry, myth -it meant essentially imaginative literature-fairy tales an it please you." Literature to Plato meant pretty much the same thing; for he, too, would teach children by fables, which he says are "fictions, though there are in them some elements of truth.” And by fairy tales Plate would open up the child's mind, for these half reveal and half conceal the truth, for the little child is as yet too tender to look upon Truth unveiled.

Classic fairy tales, myths, legends, and sagas, born in the childhood of the world, are the true food for little children; because the little child is psychically near to the childlike races of the early world, and the same things which appealed to the credulous barbarian appeal to him. The Puritan divines, Rousseau, as well as some modern writers on Education, would forbid the fairy tale in the schoolroom. "As for romances and VOL. XVII. 904

LIVING AGE.

idle tales," writes Richard Baxter, "I have already shown in my book of Self-Denial how pernicious they are, especially to youth." "When thou canst read," counsels Thomas White, "read no ballads and foolish books, but the Bible, and the Plaine Man's Pathway to Heaven." Rugged enough was this pathway, as spelled out by the little Puritan child; but, happily for him, no one denied him his David and Goliath, his Daniel and the den of lions, his Joseph and his brethren; for the Bible always remained to him.

Rousseau sternly forbade fairy tales. The child was to learn only from real things within his experience, and his emotional nature was to be left severely alone. He dared to present the naked truth to the little child, which Plato would spare him. "Men may learn from fables," he writes, "but children must be told the bare truth; if it be veiled they do not trouble to lift the veil." So in his passion for realities, Rousseau would clip the wings of the child's imagination, and thus maim him for life; for the folk-lore and fairy tales not read in childhood miss their effect for ever.

Rousseau set many brains and pens at work on educational theories. There was Madame de Genlis, with her Adèle et Théodore, her amazing vanity, and her many followers; and in England he ushered in the didactic literature of the Aiken, Day and Edgeworth, type, and instructive stories for children with a moral lurking behind

1

every incident

became the order of the day. And trivial enough were the incidents as well as the morals pointed for the long-suffering and well-brought-up little children who read them. Retribution is swift in these stories, as well as severe. The thoughtless boy forgets to tie his shoe, and he instantly falls down stairs and breaks his leg, while his father stands moralizing over him on the sin of carelessness instead of fetching a doctor. Bad boys are all hanged on gibbets, and the good ones become smug Lord Mayors and ride in gilt coaches; and all the parents lack humor, humanity, and a sense of proportion. Truly the theory of the discipline of consequences ran smoothly in these stories, where the wicked ceased to flourish as a green bay tree.

The merit of this didactic literature differed considerably. Miss Edgeworth's and Mrs. Barbauld's work commands our respect. There is often a dignified simplicity and stately seriousness about it which we must admire. But we cannot love the stories of these ladies, any more than we can love the prim little Harrys and Lucys in them, with their proper behavior and correct sentiments. "Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational systems," as Moreley says; and this truly was an era of preaching without end. Along with this eternal preaching came shoals of intolerably dull little books on general information. All things under heaven were taught to little children in improving dialogues with priggish parents or omniscient maiden aunts. The fairy world of childhood was very far away from the pedantic little people in Sandford and Merton and Scientific Dialogues, and Charles Lamb mourns over it. In a letter to Coleridge he writes, "Knowledge must now come to the child in the shape of Knowledge, instead of that beautiful interest

in wild tales which make the child a man, while all the time he suspects himself to be a child. . . . Think of what you would have been now, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural History."

It is a relief to come upon Charles Lamb's Story of Ulysses and Mrs. Leicester's School amid all the utilitarian literature of the time. In the former he has given a romantic touch and a literary form to one of the finest tales in the world for children. And Mrs. Leicester's School has a charm of its own with its dainty descriptions, natural incidents, and sweet humor. One reads it again and again with something like longing to be an imaginative person of eight, in order fully to enter into it. "Wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best," is the verdict of Sir Thomas Talfourd on the work of Charles and Mary Lamb for children. Their books truly shine like gleams of sunlight in a gray didactic age. Even Dr. Johnson has a word to say in favor of the fairies: "Babies do not like to hear stories of babies like themselves," he says; "they require to have their imagination raised by tales of giants and fairies, castles and enchantments." This rouses a protest from Miss Edgeworth, who soberly argues that children are not to be given the things they like. "Why should their minds be filled with fantastic visions instead of useful knowledge?” she asks severely. "It is to be hoped," she continues, "that the magic of Dr. Johnson's name will not have power to restore the reign of fairies." She is an ardent Rousseauist, and she claims to have refrained from all poetical allusions which appeal to a child's imagination in her Parents' Assistant. But even Rousseau and his disciples were not strong enough to suppress the fairy lore of England which served to

nourish our Lambs, Coleridges, Wordsworths, and also our Shakespeares, Spensers and Herricks; for the folk lore of England has found its way into her literature and has become immortal.

The crown and glory of the English fairy world is the Midsummer Night's Dream, which is dear to us still, as it was to our forefathers.

Deep in the heart of primitive races, children, poets, and simple folk, lies a craving for fairy tales and romances, and so treasures have been preserved for us, as old as the Pyramids, which have endured through the ages, preserved by peasants, poets and children; for the wise and the worldly have been too much occupied with higher matters to think about these things. And these treasures have been handed down orally, or stored up in little blue and scarlet books, with a gold pattern running all over them, and these books have been sold at fairs, along with gilt gingerbreads, to simple folk, who wanted sentiment along with their literature, for the same reason as they wanted gilt on their gingerbread; and so they wept over the sorrows of Rosamond in her bower and the Babes in the Wood, as they told the stories again and again to their children and their children's children. A book was a book in those days, and a story was a story, and there were fairies and romances too in our land.

And a surprising number and variety of fairies there were, and one wonders sorrowfully where they have all gone to. It may be that the amazing multiplication of text-books and schools which weighs us down in these days has killed them all; for it is well known that text-books, and the wisdom of the schools, are fatal to the fairies. At any rate, there were in England, in the old days, Saxon fairies, Celtic fairies, and Scandina

vian fairies. The oldest and bestloved were the elves, pixies and trolls dear to the Danes and Saxons; for do we not know from Sir Walter Scott that "Jack, commonly called the Giant-killer, and Thomas Thumb landed in England from the very same keels and warships which conveyed Hengist and Horsa and Ebba the Saxon?"

1

Then, centuries later, when the Puritan influence began to decline, we took to our hearts and homes those delightful fairies which became so popular in France in the eighteenth century; for France was weary of long-winded allegorical romances, and pined for something short, amusing and strictly proper and the fairy tales met all these, as well as all other reasonable and unreasonable requirements, and they very properly became the rage. Perrault the philosopher, and Madame d'Aulnoy, introduced them to our shores, and so we became possessed of the fascinating, though somewhat gruesome Bluebeard, and the romantic, and never-to-be-forgotten history of the White Cat. And the German fairies came our way too. These were less spiritual, perhaps, and certainly more mysterious and schauderhaft than their French neighbors. They were recommended to us by a learned philologist named Grimm, to whom all German fairy lore was revealed. Then, too, the wonders and richness of the glowing East came to us, with enchantments, potentates, and powerful genii or Djinns imprisoned in jars, rings and lamps.

Certainly no country has had a richer heritage in fairies, and perhaps none has made less use of such a heritage in the schoolroom.

In defending the use of fairy tales in the schoolroom, one would urge first that they are a powerful aid in the training of the imagination; and imagination is strong in the little