Many of the stories in the so-called fairy books are technically not fairy stories but nursery sagas, as we use the term today; for instance, most of those in Miss Mulock's "Fairy Book" and the larger part in the "Blue and the Green Fairy Books." They are English, French, German, and other _Märchen_ retold. Jean Ingelow's "Mopsa the Fairy" has a good-sounding title for a typical fairy book, though the material seems to be literary rather than traditional. Brentano's creatures in translation surely bear literary names, whatever they have in the original. Dream-my-Soul and Sir Skip-and-a-Jump are suggestive of the pen. But Puck of Pook's Hill comes near to being of the solid traditional Northern type--at least in declaration. He says he is the oldest Old Thing in England--very much at your service if you care to have anything to do with him; but, by Oak and Ash and Thorn, he hates the painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of imposters! He is for Wayland-Smith and magic and the old days before the Conquest. Charles Kingsley's Madam How and Lady Why are noble fairies without dispute--really goddesses; yet, strange to say, they have revealed themselves to a pedagogue and have permitted their work to be the subject of lectures. Still, they are companionable and wholesome and none the less marvelous than their more common sisters. This is an interesting contamination of genres--the pedagogical narrative combined with the fairy tale. Usually the combination is not so happily made. [How to proceed to write a fairy-tale]