The Wagner Story Book

Excerpt

There is a certain little girl who sometimes tries to find out when I am not over busy, so that she may ask me to tell her a story.  She is kind enough to say that she likes my stories, and this so flatters my vanity that I like nothing better than telling them to her.  One reason why she likes them, I suspect, is that they are not really my stories at all, the most of them.  They are the stories that the whole world has known and loved all these hundreds and thousands of years, tales of the gods and the heroes, of the giants and the goblins.  Those are the right stories to tell to children, I believe, and the right ones for children to hear—­the wonderful things that used to be done, up in the sky, and down under the ocean, and inside the mountains.  If the boys and girls do not find out now, while they are young, all about the strange, mysterious, magical life of the days when the whole world was young, it is ten to one that they will never find out about it at all, for the most of us do not keep ourselves like children always, though surely we have all been told plainly enough that that is what we ought to do.