Timid parents and teachers who have never used these stories have some misgivings as to the effect of the strenuous, not to say lawless, atmosphere. They say that the burden of approval is placed upon an outlaw, who constantly and successfully flouts the officers and processes of the law; that the merry-men are, after all, the gang; that the multiplicity of quarrels and cracked crowns accustoms the children to blood and violence; in short, that the legitimate outcome of a genuine dramatic sympathy with the story is general Hooliganism. The good teachers who have used the stories never say these things because they never see these results. It needs but a word to transfer the emphasis from Robin Hood's outlawry to the cruel and unjust laws against which he stood; to keep to the front his generosity to his men, his tenderness toward those in trouble, his sense of personal honor, his readiness to accept and acknowledge a fair defeat, the loyalty of his men. It is the transfiguration of the gang; and as a social matter it is the transfiguration rather than the destruction of the gang which we desire to accomplish. One hastens to acknowledge, however, that the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the stories calls for some antidote, which we may find partly in the literature we choose to accompany this cycle. Very naturally one thinks of the greenwood, and at once finds many bits that fit into the scenic background of the story and introduce the gentler aspects of the woods and woodland things. With the _Odyssey_ we should choose some things to reinforce the love of home and the longing for the hearth-fire, and we must use some of the same things to provide an element otherwise lacking in the _Robin Hood_, and to modify the fascination of the wildwood life and the unattached condition. Some of the ideas on the surface of the stories may be enlarged and enriched--as loyalty and devotion to a leader. There is a fine opportunity to launch into the children's experience upon the wave of their enthusiasm for Robin Hood, other and nobler ideals of the leader and the hero; though we must never expect the child, glowing with the satisfaction of deeds done, to give any appreciation worth considering to the suffering hero or to the heroism of peace. This properly belongs to a much later period--to what it is not mere jargon to call the lyric age, when some more effective appeal can be made to those powers that come of introspection.