Though sympathy with men and women did not make Cruikshank courteous to ghosts, he was led by the credulity and experience of his childhood to be affectionate to fairies and almost patriotic in his feeling about the magical countries in which they dwell. In a note to "Puss in Boots" he informs us that his nurse told him when he was "a very little boy" that the fairies "had houses in the white places"--_i.e._ fungi--in the corners of cellars. In cellars he accordingly looked for them, "and certainly did ... fancy" that he saw "very, _very_ tiny little people running in and out of these little white houses"--_i.e._fungi--and attributed any power he possessed of drawing or describing a fairy to his nurse's communications and his visions in cellars. Like a sword-swallower I saw in Belfast, I will ask you to "put your hands together," for the anecdote just related is corroborated by the charm of his fairy drawings. [Illustration: From "Comic Composites for the Scrap-Book," 1821.] What happened when Cruikshank went into cellars is symbolical of poetry. He saw what was not there by that creative touch of mind which transforms an object by increasing its similitude to something else. In _Comic Composites for the Scrap Book_ (1821), we have intelligent human creatures suggested by arrangements of household implements. As I look at the mundatory erection here reproduced, I anachronistically hum Stephen Glover's "March composed for Prince Albert's Hussars." It is, however, less brilliant than the aldermanic bellows and the doctor (with a mortar for body, cottonwool for hair and labels for feet), to whom he states his symptoms in "Scraps and Sketches" (1831), for they amuse the satirist even at this date when gluttony is merely not moderation and bored sapience is merely not sympathetic wisdom. Cruikshank then had one great qualification for illustrating fairy tales: he could animate the inanimate. Let us now follow his career as a fairy artist, beginning with his first great success. [Illustration: THE GOOSE GIRL. From "German Popular Stories," vol. ii., 1826.]