By a tacit agreement fairy tales have come to be consigned to the nursery; the old tools of superstition have become the child’s toys, and when a writer comes forward, now, bringing new fairy tales, it is almost always with an apology, not for trespassing upon ground already occupied, but for indulging in what is no longer belief, but make-belief. “My story,” he is apt to say, “is not true; we none of us believe it, and I shall give you good evidence before I am done that least of all do I believe it. I shall probably explain it by referring it to a strange dream, or shall justify it by the excellent lesson it is to teach. I adopt the fairy form as suited to the imagination of children; it is a childish thing, and I am half ashamed, as a grown person, to be found engaged in such nonsense.” Out of this way of regarding fairy tales has come that peculiar monstrosity of the times, the scientific fairy tale, which is nothing short of an insult to a whole race of innocent beings. It may be accepted as a foregone conclusion that with a disbelief in fairies the genuine fairy tale has died, and that it is better to content ourselves with those stories which sprang from actual belief, telling them over to successive generations of children, than to seek to extend the literature by any ingenuity of modern skepticism. There they are, the fairy tales without authorship, as imperishable as nursery ditties; scholarly collections of them may be made, but they will have their true preservation, not as specimens in a museum of literary curiosities, but as children’s toys. Like the sleeping princess in the wood, the fairy tale may be hedged about with bristling notes and thickets of commentaries, but the child will pass straight to the beauty, and awaken for his own delight the old charmed life.