The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac | Page 9

sucklings are no longer regaled with
the soothing tales of giants, ogres, witches, and fairies; their hungry,
receptive minds are filled with stories about the pursuit and slaughter of
unoffending animals, of war and of murder, and of those questionable
practices whereby a hero is enriched and others are impoverished.

Before he is out of his swaddling- cloth the modern youngster is
convinced that the one noble purpose in life is to get, get, get, and keep
on getting of worldly material. The fairy tale is tabooed because, as the
sordid parent alleges, it makes youth unpractical.
One consequence of this deplorable condition is, as I have noticed (and
as Judge Methuen has, too), that the human eye is diminishing in size
and fulness, and is losing its lustre. By as much as you take the
God-given grace of fancy from man, by so much do you impoverish his
eyes. The eye is so beautiful and serves so very many noble purposes,
and is, too, so ready in the expression of tenderness, of pity, of love, of
solicitude, of compassion, of dignity, of every gentle mood and noble
inspiration, that in that metaphor which contemplates the eternal
vigilance of the Almighty we recognize the best poetic expression of
the highest human wisdom.
My nephew Timothy has three children, two boys and a girl. The elder
boy and the girl have small black eyes; they are as devoid of fancy as a
napkin is of red corpuscles; they put their pennies into a tin bank, and
they have won all the marbles and jack- stones in the neighborhood.
They do not believe in Santa Claus or in fairies or in witches; they
know that two nickels make a dime, and their golden rule is to do
others as others would do them. The other boy (he has been christened
Matthew, after me) has a pair of large, round, deep-blue eyes,
expressive of all those emotions which a keen, active fancy begets.
Matthew can never get his fill of fairy tales, and how the dear little
fellow loves Santa Claus! He sees things at night; he will not go to bed
in the dark; he hears and understands what the birds and crickets say,
and what the night wind sings, and what the rustling leaves tell.
Wherever Matthew goes he sees beautiful pictures and hears sweet
music; to his impressionable soul all nature speaks its wisdom and its
poetry. God! how I love that boy! And he shall never starve! A goodly
share of what I have shall go to him! But this clause in my will, which
the Judge recently drew for me, will, I warrant me, give the dear child
the greatest happiness:
``Item. To my beloved grandnephew and namesake, Matthew, I do
bequeath and give (in addition to the lands devised and the stocks,
bonds and moneys willed to him, as hereinabove specified) the two
mahogany bookcases numbered 11 and 13, and the contents thereof,

being volumes of fairy and folk tales of all nations, and dictionaries and
other treatises upon demonology, witchcraft, mythology, magic and
kindred subjects, to be his, his heirs, and his assigns, forever.''

III
THE LUXURY OF READING IN BED
Last night, having written what you have just read about the benefits of
fairy literature, I bethought me to renew my acquaintance with some of
those tales which so often have delighted and solaced me. So I piled at
least twenty chosen volumes on the table at the head of my bed, and I
daresay it was nigh daylight when I fell asleep. I began my
entertainment with several pages from Keightley's ``Fairy Mythology,''
and followed it up with random bits from Crofton Croker's ``Traditions
of the South of Ireland,'' Mrs. Carey's ``Legends of the French
Provinces,'' Andrew Lang's Green, Blue and Red fairy books,
Laboulaye's ``Last Fairy Tales,'' Hauff's ``The Inn in the Spessart,''
Julia Goddard's ``Golden Weathercock,'' Frere's ``Eastern Fairy
Legends,'' Asbjornsen's ``Folk Tales,'' Susan Pindar's ``Midsummer
Fays,'' Nisbit Bain's ``Cossack Fairy Tales,'' etc., etc.
I fell asleep with a copy of Villamaria's fairy stories in my hands, and I
had a delightful dream wherein, under the protection and guidance of
my fairy godmother, I undertook the rescue of a beautiful princess who
had been enchanted by a cruel witch and was kept in prison by the
witch's son, a hideous ogre with seven heads, whose companions were
four equally hideous dragons.
This undertaking in which I was engaged involved a period of five
years, but time is of precious little consideration to one when he is
dreaming of exploits achieved in behalf of a beautiful princess. My
fairy godmother (she wore a mob-cap and was hunchbacked) took good
care of me, and conducted me safely through all my encounters with
demons, giants, dragons,