a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the
model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's
colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to
visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas,
he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork
rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than
the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for
several minutes trying to find something really large and finding
everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five
prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the
hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment
with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the
other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at the
book again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil
of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe." So the
backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours a
day for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there was an end of
him.

Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly
enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished to
be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately became
one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of
an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at
intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic
pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward
the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and
impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked
like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint
horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more
mystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever.
He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not
come to the end of it yet.

Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest
qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit
for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is
not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact
the almost desperate motive of excusing or pal