Produced by David Edwards, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) THE RAINBOW BOOK _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ LITTLEDOM CASTLE MY SON AND I MARGERY REDFORD THE LOVE FAMILY THE CHILD OF THE AIR _All rights reserved_ [Illustration: _The Fish-King and the Dog-Fish_] [Illustration: The Rainbow Book Tales of Fun & Fancy By Mrs. M. H. SPIELMANN Illustrated by Arthur Rackham Hugh Thomson Bernard Partridge Lewis Baumer Harry Rountree C. Wilhelm NEW YORK FREDERICK WARNE AND CO. 1909] TO BARBARA MARY RACKHAM WITH ALL GOOD WISHES FOR HER FUTURE HAPPINESS MABEL H. SPIELMANN PREFACE It's all very well--but you, and I, and most of us who are healthy in mind and blithe of spirit, love to give rein to our fun and fancy, and to mingle fun with our fancy and fancy with our fun. The little Fairy-people are the favourite children of Fancy, and were born into this serious world ages and ages ago to help brighten it, and make it more graceful and dainty and prettily romantic than it was. They found the Folk-lore people already here--grave, learned people whose learning was all topsy-turvy, for it dealt with toads, and storms, and diseases, and what strange things would happen if you mixed them up together, and how the devil would flee if you did something with a herb, and how the tempest would stop suddenly, as Terence records, if you sprinkled a few drops of vinegar in front of it. No doubt, since then thousands of people have sprinkled tens of thousands of gallons of good vinegar before advancing tempests, and although tempests pay far less attention to the liquid than the troubled waters to a pint of oil, the sprinklers and their descendants have gone on believing with a touching faith. It is pretty, but not practical.