Page:The Allies Fairy Book.djvu/23

 Nature herself is always laying traps for mortal credulity. An instance has lately occurred in the knowledge of the present writer. A little girl of four years old, brought up in the country, was walking in the woods, in the middle of a spring afternoon, with her father and mother. The parents determined that they had gone far enough, and turned back, to the displeasure of their little girl, who yet gave no reason for wanting to go on. But some hours later she was asked why she had been so anxious to do so. “Because I might have talked to the fairy,” she answered. “Fairy! What fairy?” “Why, didn’t you see the green fairy dancing at the side of the path?” That happy apparition had certainly not been seen by the parents, but the little girl was so positive that she was taken back to the spot in the wood to prove her mistake to her. “But there she is still! Don’t you see her dancing?” And then the father of the child observed, far down the path, a newly leaved birch-bush, which quivered in the wind, and certainly bore a quite remarkable resemblance to a little lady in a full green skirt. The child had not observed a likeness to a fairy, but had instantly accepted the illusion as a fact, and had seen a fairy. It seems to me probable that this is characteristic of the way in which savages accept natural phenomena as forms of enchantment.

The credit of having been the earliest to set down in literature the wandering folk-tales of Europe is given to the Italian novelist, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, who published his first collection of stories called “Piacevole Notti,” or “Pleasant Nights,” at Venice in 1550. He is thought to have got much of his folk-lore from sailors and travellers who came out of the East, and to this fact is attributed the tinge of Orientalism which marks most of the fairy-tales of Western Europe. Mr. Waters, from whose admirable translation we borrow one story, has introduced the “Notti” to English readers in an essay