the
haughty sisters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived among the
ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order to make her feet seem
smaller and left bloody marks on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's
slipper was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such brutality in
_her_ fairyland. But, except Hans Christian Andersen's, there are no
such gripping fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. During this
vacation, too, I discovered the "Leprachaun," the little Irish fairy
with the hammer. He was not at all like the English fairies in
Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leaving out Ariel, I
think I liked him best of all.

That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in
the attic. The print was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. No
doubt there is much to be said by the pedagogues in favour of
scrupulously studying Shakespeare's plays; but if you have never
discovered "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" when you were
very young, you will never know the meaning of that light which never
was on land or sea, and with which Keats surrounds us in the "Ode to the
Nightingale." The love interest did not count much. In my youthful
experience everybody either married or died, in books. That was to be
expected. It was the atmosphere that counted. One could see the troopers
coming into the open space in the Forest of Arden and hear their songs,
making the leaves of the trees quiver before they appeared. And Puck!
and Caliban! When I was young I was always very sorry for Caliban, and,
being very religious, I felt that the potent Prospero might have done
something for his soul.

There was a boy who lived near us called Lawrence Stockdale--peace be
to his ashes where-ever he rests! His father and mother, who were
persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but we were not of one
opinion on any subject. He was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the
episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe that Dumas was "wrong." I
preferred Sir Walter Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive
devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, however, I discovered
somewhere, under a pile of old geometries and books about navigation, a
fat, red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said that "Boccaccio" was
"wronger" than Dumas, and that his people had warned him against the
stories of this Italian. As we lived near an Italian colony, and he
disliked Italians, while I loved the