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is a blank sheet of paper—several blank sheets of paper. What shall I put upon them? I declare I don't know. Shall it be a fashionable story of modern life? I know nothing of fashionable life. A mediæval romance? It would take too much cramming. A sea story? I know nothing about the sea, except that it makes me sick. A fairy tale then? Well, a fairy tale be it.

"But," says the acute reader, "if you decline to write a story about fashionable life because you know little of Fashion, how is it that you propose to write about fairies, of whom you must know still less?" Exactly. I know nothing at all about fairies—but then neither do you. If I attempt to depict fashionable life, and make his Lordship the Duke dance a double hornpipe in September, at a Buckingham Palace ball, with the Eight Honourable Lady Annabel Hicks, daughter of Sir Wickham Hicks, Puisne Judge, and Member for Birmingham-super-Mare, you may be down upon me