E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 38654-h.htm or 38654-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38654/pg38654-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38654/38654-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Text in italics is surrounded by underscores (_italics_). [Illustration: THE MARKET PLACE IN NUREMBURG] Everychild's Series GREAT OPERA STORIES Taken from Original Sources in Old German by MILLICENT S. BENDER Illustrated New York The Macmillan Company 1935 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1912, By the Macmillan Company. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1912. Reprinted March, 1913; June, 1915; January, September, 1916; November, 1917 July, 1931; November, 1935. Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS PAGE CHILDREN OF KINGS 1 HAENSEL AND GRETEL 35 THE MASTER SINGERS 57 LOHENGRIN, THE KNIGHT OF THE SWAN 101 THE FLYING DUTCHMAN 137 TANNHAEUSER, THE MINSTREL KNIGHT 156 GREAT OPERA STORIES [Illustration] CHILDREN OF KINGS I Once upon a time, in a lonely glade between high mountains far, far above the World of Men, there stood a hut. It was a miserable, tumbledown, little hut, and the mosses of many summers clung to its sloping roof. It had a bent stovepipe where its chimney should have been, a slanting board in place of a doorstep, and just one, poor, little, broken window. Yet it was not its forlorn appearance alone that made the hut hide behind the shadows of the grim forest, far away from the sight of man. It had more, much more than that to be ashamed of. For a hideous Witch lived there,--and with her, a Goosegirl. They lived alone, those two,--the Goosegirl, with the joy of youth in her heart; and the Witch, unmindful of joy or youth, thinking only of magic and evil and hate. While the Goosegirl had been growing from babyhood to girlhood, from girlhood to womanhood, dreaming and wondering and wishing,--she knew not what,--the Witch had been trying to make her as ugly and as wicked as herself. But try as she would, the heart of the Goosegirl was so pure that evil could find no spot in it to lodge. As for her face, each passing year left it lovelier than the last. The sunshine was no brighter than her yellow hair, the sky no bluer than her clear blue eyes. The lone lily before the hut envied the whiteness of her skin, and the birch tree in the woods, the slenderness of her form.