E-text prepared by David Edwards, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the lovely original illustrations and decorations in color. See 32242-h.htm or 32242-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32242/pg32242-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32242/32242-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://www.archive.org/details/wonderbookforgir00hawt A WONDER BOOK FOR GIRLS & BOYS [Illustration] by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE With 60 Designs by Walter Crane Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company [Illustration: BELLEROPHON ON PEGASVS] Copyright, 1851, by Nathaniel Hawthorne Copyright, 1879, by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop Copyright, 1883 and 1892, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. All Rights Reserved PREFACE [Illustration] The author has long been of opinion that many of the classical myths were capable of being rendered into very capital reading for children. In the little volume here offered to the public, he has worked up half a dozen of them, with this end in view. A great freedom of treatment was necessary to his plan; but it will be observed by every one who attempts to render these legends malleable in his intellectual furnace, that they are marvellously independent of all temporary modes and circumstances. They remain essentially the same, after changes that would affect the identity of almost anything else. He does not, therefore, plead guilty to a sacrilege, in having sometimes shaped anew, as his fancy dictated, the forms that have been hallowed by an antiquity of two or three thousand years. No epoch of time can claim a copyright in these immortal fables. They seem never to have been made; and certainly, so long as man exists, they can never perish; but, by their indestructibility itself, they are legitimate subjects for every age to clothe with its own garniture of manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its own morality. In the present version they may have lost much of their classical aspect (or, at all events, the author has not been careful to preserve it), and have perhaps assumed a Gothic or romantic guise.