Project Gutenberg's The Fairy Book, by Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

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Title: The Fairy Book
The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew

Author: Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

Release Date: November 7, 2006 [EBook #19734]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAIRY BOOK ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE FAIRY BOOK.

THE BEST POPULAR STORIES SELECTED
AND RENDERED ANEW.

BY

MISS MULOCK

THE AUTHOR OF
"JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN."

NEW YORK AND LONDON:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.

* * * * *

DEDICATED

TO

LITTLE OLIVE.

* * * * *

PREFACE.

A preface is usually an excrescence on a good book, and a vain apology
for a worthless one; but, in the present instance, a few explanatory
words seem necessary.

This is meant to be the best collection attainable of that delight of
all children, and of many grown people who retain the child-heart
still--the old-fashioned, time-honored classic Fairy-tale. It has been
compiled from all sources--far-off and familiar; when familiar, the
stories have been traced with care to their original form, which, if
foreign, has been retranslated, condensed, and in any other needful
way made suitable for modern British children. Perrault, Madame
d'Aulnois, and Grimm have thus been laid under contribution. Where it
was not possible to get at the original of a tale, its various
versions have been collated, compared, and combined; and in some
instances, when this proved still unsatisfactory, the whole story has
been written afresh. The few English fairy tales extant, such as _Jack
the Giant Killer, Tom Thumb_, etc., whose authorship is lost in
obscurity, but whose charming Saxon simplicity of style, and intense
rea