Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning | Page 2

who can change themselves into any forms they please, and can turn other people into stone. And there are beasts and birds who can talk, and fishes that come out on dry land, with golden rings in their mouths; and good maidens who drop rubies and pearls when they speak, and bad ones out of whose mouths come all kinds of ugly things. Then there are evil-minded fairies, who always want to be doing mischief; and there are good fairies, beautifully dressed, and with shining golden hair and bright blue eyes and jewelled coronets, and with magic wands in their hands, who go about watching the bad fairies, and always come just in time to drive them away, and so prevent them from doing harm--the sort of Fairies you see once a year at the pantomimes, only more beautiful, and more handsomely dressed, and more graceful in shape, and not so fat, and who do not paint their faces, which is a bad thing for any woman to do, whether fairy or mortal.
Altogether, this Fairy Land that we can make for ourselves in a moment, is a very pleasant and most delightful place, and one which all of us, young and old, may well desire to get into, even if we have to come back from it sooner than we like. It is just the country to suit everybody, for all of us can find in it whatever pleases him best. If he likes work, there is plenty of adventure; he can climb up mountains of steel, or travel over seas of glass, or engage in single combat with a giant, or dive down into the caves of the little red dwarfs and bring up their hidden treasures, or mount a horse that goes more swiftly than the wind, or go off on a long journey to find the water of youth and life, or do anything else that happens to be very dangerous and troublesome. If he doesn't like work, it is again just the place to suit idle people, because it is all Midsummer holidays. I never heard of a school in Fairy Land, nor of masters with canes or birch rods, nor of impositions and long lessons to be learned when one gets home in the evening. Then the weather is so delightful. It is perpetual sunshine, so that you may lie out in the fields all day without catching cold; and yet it is not too hot, the sunshine being a sort of twilight, in which you see everything, quite clearly, but softly, and with beautiful colours, as if you were in a delightful dream.
And this goes on night and day, or at least what we call night, for they don't burn gas there, or candles, or anything of that kind; so that there is no regular going to bed and getting up; you just lie down anywhere when you want to rest, and when you have rested, you wake up again, and go on with your travels. There is one capital thing about Fairy Land. There are no doctors there; not one in the whole country. Consequently nobody is ill, and there are no pills or powders, or brimstone and treacle, or senna tea, or being kept at home when you want to go out, or being obliged to go to bed early and have gruel instead of cake and sweetmeats. They don't want the doctors, because if you cut your finger it gets well directly, and even when people are killed, or are turned into stones, or when anything else unpleasant happens, it can all be put right in a minute or two. All you have to do when you are in trouble is to go and look for some wrinkled old woman in a patched old brown cloak, and be very civil to her, and to do cheerfully and kindly any service she asks of you, and then she will throw off the dark cloak, and become a young and beautiful Fairy Queen, and wave her magic wand, and everything will fall out just as you would like to have it.
As to Time, they take no note of it in Fairy Land. The Princess falls asleep for a hundred years, and wakes up quite rosy, and young, and beautiful. Friends and sweethearts are parted for years, and nobody seems to think they have grown older when they meet, or that life has become shorter, and so they fall to their youthful talk as if nothing had happened. Thus the dwellers in Fairy Land have no cares about chronology. With them there is no past or future; it is all present--so there are no disagreeable dates to learn, nor tables of kings, and when they reigned, or who succeeded them, or what battles they