But when we have agreed that the fairy-tales constitute precisely the right artistic material for these children; when we have fixed with satisfactory definiteness the hour of their ripeness for them; when we have indicated those elements in the tales that render them serviceable, we are still at the beginning of our task. For we find ourselves in the presence of a vast mass of material from which we must choose those things that are so typical as to accomplish for our children the characteristic service of folk-tales, and so beautiful as to perform the added service of good literature. And so wide is the range of subject-matter and form in the stories constituting the mass that it becomes evident at a glance that the educational and artistic efficacy of the fairy-tales depends upon the wisdom used in choosing the actual specimens. The most useful thing to be done, then, is to determine a set of trustworthy and practical principles of selection. We should understand, to begin with, what we mean by fairy-tales. It is now impossible to limit this term to those stories that deal with the activities of an order of invented preter-human beings called fairies; or even to those that contain preternatural or supernatural elements. With the old fairy-tales in this narrow sense, have been incorporated folk-tales dealing with matter which involves only natural and human material--beast-tales and bits of comic adventure, for example. It is possible to treat them, however, in one category, because of the fact that in all those that are worth using for the children in class, whether there be fairies involved or not, the imaginative process is of the same kind, the vision of the world, its activities and its possibilities, is on the same level of imaginative combination and artistic interpretation; and this is the level of the children for whom we are choosing. The traditionary stories, the real folk-tales, have been divided into four classes. 1. Sagas--stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be believed. They are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. They are, as a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making--of the same stuff in many cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales which the poets took up. Such folk-sagas are _Whittington and His Cat_ and _Lady Godiva_. Most of these stories have preternatural or supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination.