_Some qualities of these modern tales._ Every age produces after its own fashion, and we must expect to find the modern user of the fairy-story method expressing through it the qualities of his own outlook upon the world. Interest in the picturesque aspects of landscape will be emphasized, as in the early portions of "The Story of Fairyfoot" and, with especial magnificence of style, throughout _The King of the Golden River_. There will appear the saddened mood of the modern in the face of the human miseries that make happiness a mockery, as in "The Happy Prince." The destructive effects of the possessive instinct upon all that is finest in human nature is reflected in "The Prince's Dream." That the most valuable efforts are often those performed with least spectacular settings may be discerned in "The Knights of the Silver Shield," while the lesson of kindly helpfulness is the burden of "Old Pipes and the Dryad." In many modern stories the reader is too much aware of the conscious efforts of style and structure. The thoughtful child will sometimes be too much distressed by the more somber modern story, and should not hear too many of the gloomy type. _Andersen the consummate master._ Hans Christian Andersen is the acknowledged master of the modern story for children. What are the sources of his success? Genius is always unexplainable except in terms of itself, but some things are clear. To begin, he makes a mark--drives down a peg: "There came a soldier marching along the high road--_one, two! one, two!_" and you are off. No backing and filling, no jockeying for position, no elaborate setting of the stage. The story's the thing! Next, the language is the language of common oral speech, free and unrestrained. The rigid forms of the grammar are eschewed. There is no beating around the bush. Seeing through the eyes of the child, he uses the language that is natural to such sight: "Aha! there sat the dog with eyes as big as mill-wheels." In quick dramatic fashion the story unrolls before your vision: "So the soldier cut the witch's head off. There she lay!" No agonizing over the cruelty of it, the lack of sympathy. It is a joke after the child's own heart, and with a hearty laugh at this end to an impostor, the listener is on with the story. The logic is the logic of childhood: "And everyone could see she was a real princess, for she was so lovely." When Andersen deals with some of the deeper truths of existence, as in "The Nightingale" or "The Ugly Duckling," he still manages to throw it all into the form that is natural and convincing and simple to the child. He never mounts a pedestal and becomes a grown-up philosopher. Perhaps Andersen's secret lay in the fact that some fairy godmother invested him at birth with a power to see things so completely as a child sees them that he never questioned the dignity of the method. In few of his stories is there any evidence of a constraint due to a