"And to tell you the truth, my precious little folks," quoth King Midas, diligently trotting the children all the while, "ever since that morning I have hated the very sight of all other gold save this." Hawthorne was by no means the first man who ever told about King Midas, nor are the children who have lived since his time the first who ever heard this story; for hundreds and hundreds of years ago, in a country very different from ours, the little Greek children heard it told in a language that would seem very strange to us. However, Hawthorne has by no means told the story just as the Greek mothers or Greek nurses might have told it to their children; he has added much which makes the story seem more real and the characters more human. For instance, as he says, the old myth told nothing about any daughter of Midas's, and yet I think we are all ready to admit that we should not love the story half so well without dear little Marygold. Then too, the talk about Midas's spectacles and about his trotting his grandchildren on his knee is but a little pleasant fooling on the part of Hawthorne, for spectacles were not even thought of for centuries after the time of old King Midas, and it is much more than unlikely that any old Greek ever trotted children on his knee. Hawthorne had a perfect right to make these changes in the story; for the old myths have come down to us from so long ago that they seem to belong to everybody, and every one forms his own ideas of them. Thus you will see that while the author of this story thought of Marygold as a little child who climbed up onto her father's knee, the artists in dealing with the subject have thought of her as almost a young woman. Which of these two ideas do you like better? THE CHILD'S WORLD By W. B. Rands Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World, With the wonderful water round you curled, And the wonderful grass upon your breast-- World, you are beautifully dressed. The wonderful air is over me, And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree; It walks on the water, and whirls the mills, And talks to itself on the tops of the hills. You, friendly Earth! how far do you go With the wheat-fields that nod and the rivers that flow, With cities and gardens, and cliffs, and isles, And people upon you for thousands of miles? Ah, you are so great, and I am so small, I tremble to think of you, World, at all; And yet, when I said my prayers to-day, A whisper inside me seemed to say: "You are more than the Earth, though you are such a dot-- You can love and think, and the Earth cannot!" THE FIR TREE By Hans Christian Andersen