As to Time, they take no note of it in Fairy Land. The Princess falls asleep for a hundred years, and wakes up quite rosy, and young, and beautiful. Friends and sweethearts are parted for years, and nobody seems to think they have grown older when they meet, or that life has become shorter, and so they fall to their youthful talk as if nothing had happened. Thus the dwellers in Fairy Land have no cares about chronology. With them there is no past or future; it is all present--so there are no disagreeable dates to learn, nor tables of kings, and when they reigned, or who succeeded them, or what battles they fought, or anything of that kind. Indeed there are no such facts to be learned, for when kings are wicked in Fairy Land, a powerful magician comes and twists their heads off, or puts them to death somehow; and when they are good kings they seem to live for ever, and always to be wearing rich robes and royal golden crowns, and to be entertaining Fairy Queens, and receiving handsome brilliant gifts from everybody who knows them. Now this is Fairy Land, the dear sweet land of Once Upon a Time, where there is constant light, and summer days, and everlasting flowers, and pleasant fields and streams, and long dreams without rough waking, and ease of life, and all things strange and beautiful; where nobody wonders at anything that may happen; where good fairies are ever on the watch to help those whom they love; where youth abides, and there is no pain or death, and all trouble fades away, and whatever seems hard is made easy, and all things that look wrong come right in the end, and truth and goodness have their perpetual triumph, and the world is ever young. And Fairy Land is always the same, and always has been, whether it is close to us--so close that we may enter it in a moment--or whether it is far off; in the stories that have come to us from the most ancient days, and the most distant lands, and in those which kind and clever story-tellers write for us now. It is the same in the legends of the mysterious East, as old as the beginning of life; the same in the glowing South, in the myths of ancient Greece; the same in the frozen regions of the Scandinavian North, and in the forests of the great Teuton land, and in the Islands of the West; the same in the tales that nurses tell to the little ones by the fireside on winter evenings, and in the songs that mothers sing to hush their babes to sleep; the same in the delightful folk-lore that Grimm has collected for us, and that dear Hans Andersen has but just ceased to tell.