That is why, therefore, I have chosen to make this book essentially a re-telling of the beautiful old tales of “The Three Sorrows,” so familiar once to our Gaelic ancestors, and still, in however crude a form, the most popular of all the tales of the Gael. They are sad, it is true, because all the old beautiful tales are sad; but it is a sadness which is a fragrance about an exquisite bloom, and that bloom wrought of joy and keen delight. They were not sad, they who lived the old, joyous, heroic life; in some poignant vicissitude, some sudden slaying, some passing of a bright flame into a melancholy wane, we see a sad gleam about the end of their days, and, seeing thus the fortuitous coming and going of life and death, read into the old chronicles a melancholy which often is not there. Of course, a tale such as “The Fate of the Children of Lir”--probably the story known above all others among the children of Western Scotland and Ireland--is sad with another sadness, that of prolonged and unmerited suffering. But to the Gaelic mind, at least, this is redeemed by the sense of heroic endurance, of the deep unselfish devotion of a lovely womanly type such as is represented by Fionula, and perhaps, above all, by the music and beauty which were the sweet doom of Fionula and her brothers. But to me not one of them is sad, save with beauty. For through all I hear the sound of Peterkin’s laughter. Sometimes it was aroused by an episode; sometimes it leapt like a hound along the trail of vagrant thoughts; sometimes it came and went as an eddying wind, none knowing whence or whither. This laughter of Peterkin has become for me one of the sweet wonderful voices of nature--the four winds of Childhood: Wonder, Delight, Longing, and Laughter. Ah, children, children, to one and all I wish the golden fortune of Peterkin. V When Peterkin was still a child he was familiar with tales of the old world which now-a-days we keep from children, because they are not old enough to understand. That, I fear, is more because we ourselves do not understand, or are out of sympathy. Is a child more likely to be hurt, or to be nobly attuned to the chant-royal of life, by acquaintance with stories of vivid and beautiful human love such as that of Nathos and Darthool, or Dermid and Grainne? Surely, what is beautiful is not a thing to be feared; and though, alas! so many of us do now indeed dread beauty and feel toward it a strange baffled aversion, there are others who know it to be the profoundest and most exquisite mystery in life. To Peterkin at any rate there was never anything but what was stirring and heroic and full of charm and beauty in these old tales: and through all his days their atmosphere was in his mind, so that he made life fairer for himself and others.