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JUNIOR CLASSICS
The
VOLUME ONE FAIRY TALES AND FABLES
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JUNIOR
The
CLASSICS
Edited by MABEL WILLIAMS and MARCIA DALPHIN.
With Introduction by WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON, Former
President of Smith College; Introduction to First Edition by
CHARLES W. ELIOT, Former President of Harvard University
Popular Edition
ILLUSTRATED
VOLUME
I^PTl FAIRY TALES
ONE 3Uk/JfAl'
lO^"%mT f*% AND FABLES
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COLLIER SON CORPORATION
P. F. &
Copyright, 1938, 1948, 1949, by
P. F. COLLIER & SON CORPORATION
FIFTY-SEVENTH PRINTING, 1957
"Conal, Donal, and Taig," "The Old Hag's Long Leather Bag," "Manis the Miller," from
"Donegal Fairy Stories," copyright, 1900, by Doubleday, Page & Company; copyright, 1928,
by Doubleday, Doran & Company. "Billy Beg and the Bull," from "In Chimney Corners,"
copyright, 1899, byDoubleday & McClure; copyright, 1908, by Doubleday, Page & Company;
copyright, 1927, by Doubleday, Doran & Company. "The Cat on the Dovrefell," "The
Husband Who Was to Mind the House," "Why the Bear Is Stumpy-Tailed," "The Lad Who
Went to the North Wind," "Boots Who Made the Princess Say 'That's a Story'," from
"East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon," copyright, 1919, by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
"Budulinek," "Zlatovlaska, the Golden-Haired," from "The Shoemaker's Apron," copyright,
1920, by Parker Fillmore. "Longshanks, Girth and Keen," from "Czechoslovak Fairy Tales,"
copyright, 1919, by Parker Fillmore. "The Litde Humpbacked Horse," "Wassilissa the
Beautiful," from "Russian Wonder Tales," copyright, 1912, by The Century Company.
All rights are reserved to the original publishers for
illustrations in this volume protected by copyright.
Acknowledgments of permissions given by authors and publishers for the use
of copyright material appear in Volume X
CGEG
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Introduction
By WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON, LL.D., UttJD.
Former President of Smith College
THE
editors of this collection of literature for young people
have had much experience and have acquired an intimate
knowledge of the needs and tastes of their special public. The
greater part of the selections are the classics of their kind, stories and
poems which have enchanted children for many generations, in
some cases for many centuries. To these have been added carefully
chosen examples of those writers of our own time who have been
most successful in the difficult and delicate art of writing for chil-
dren. Still other selections belong to the great simple things which
because they deal with certain permanent and fundamental elements
in our common nature are the exclusive possession of no age, but
appeal to young and old alike.
It is no mere accident that by far the greater part of this literature
is fiction. The world of children is a world of imagination. Their
contact with fact has not been long enough nor intimate enough to
give them that critical sense of the actual and possible that restricts
the horizons of their elders. Their world is so full of the unex-
plained and the mysterious that they have not yet acquired the habit
of testing every story by experience. Thus naturally and without
effort they surrender themselves to the flow of the narrative as long
as it holds their interest by suspense or wonder or surprise. Those
older people who enjoy romantic writing often do so because it
affords an escape and a relief from the unpleasant or harassing
things that beset them in their everyday life. But children need no
THE JUNIOR CLASSICS
vi
such escape. The shades of the prison house have not yet closed
upon them and the world of imagination is their own domain. It is
good that they should roam in it as widely and as late as possible,
since what we call the real world will seize them all too soon.
There are theorists who are troubled about the imaginativeness of
children and who fear the effect of fairy tales upon their characters.
They make a stupid confusion between fiction and falsehood. They
punish their children for romancing because they think they are
lying, not realizing that the tests of truth in the world of the
grown-up are not applicable in the child's natural world of make-
believe.
So far from the exercise of the imagination constituting a moral
danger, it is perhaps the most important discipline leading to right
relations among people. For most unkindness ancRnjustice and
cruelty and intolerance are the result of an inability to put one's self
in the other man's place. These are the vices that poison our society
and ruin our peace, and their roots are in the weakness of our imagi-
nations. Thus it is fundamental for ethical as well as aesthetic
development that the imagination should be given wide scope in
youth and kept free and flexible as long as possible.
The stories from real life, from history, biography, and adventure,
deal for the most part with the heroic virtues. This, too, is a wise
choice; for the normal child gives his admiration generously to
courage and strength and self-sacrifice. Nothing is more important
in the growth of a child than the direction of his admirations. All
children are imitative, and they tend to imitate what impresses them.
The spectacle of power is always impressive; and these tales of
pioneers and explorers, with their feats of daring and endurance, do
much to form the ideals of young people, ideals which often deter-
mine the level on which they will live their lives.
But all this is to put too much stress on the moral side. The fact
