THE STRANGE STORY BOOK
Yours Very Truly
A Lang
THE STRANGE STORY BOOK
BY MRS. LANG
EDITED BY ANDREW LANG
WITH PORTRAIT OF ANDREW LANG
AND 12 COLOURED PLATES AND
NUMEROUS OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. J. FORD
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1913
[All rights reserved]
Mrs. Andrew Lang desires to give her most gratefulthanks to the Authorities of the Smithsonian InstitutionBureau of American Ethnology for permissionto include in her Christmas book the Tlingit storiescollected by Dr. John R. Swanton.
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PREFACE
TO THE CHILDREN
And now the time has come to say good-bye; and good-byesare always so sad that it is much better when we do notknow that we have got to say them. It is so long sinceBeauty and the Beast and Cinderella and Little Red RidingHood came out to greet you in the 'Blue Fairy Book,'that some of you who wore pigtails or sailor suits in thosedays have little boys and girls of your own to read thestories to now, and a few may even have little baby grandchildren.Since the first giants and enchanted princes andill-treated step-daughters made friends with you, a wholenew world of wheels and wings and sharp-voiced bells hasbeen thrown open, and children have toy motors andaeroplanes which take up all their thoughts and time. Youmay see them in the street bending over pictures of thelast machine which has won a prize of a thousand pounds,and picturing to themselves the day when they shall inventsomething finer still, that will fly higher and sail faster thanany of those which have gone before it.
Now as this is the very last book of all this series thatbegan in the long long ago, perhaps you may like to hearsomething of the man who thought over every one of thetwenty-five, for fear lest a story should creep in which hedid not wish his little boys and girls to read. He was bornwhen nobody thought of travelling in anything but a train—avery slow one—or a steamer. It took a great deal ofpersuasion to induce him later to get into a motor and he hadnot the slightest desire to go up in an aeroplane—or to possess[viii]a telephone. Somebody once told him of a little boy who,after giving a thrilling account at luncheon of how Randolphhad taken Edinburgh Castle, had expressed a desire to goout and see the Museum; 'I like old things better than new,'said the child! 'I wish I knew that little boy,' observedthe man. 'He would just suit me.' And that was true,for he too loved great deeds of battle and adventure as wellas the curious carved and painted fragments guarded inmuseums which show that the lives described by Homerand the other old poets were not tales made up by themto amuse tired crowds gathered round a hall fire, but werereal—real as our lives now, and much more beautiful andsplendid. Very proud he was one day when he bought,in a little shop on the way to Kensington Gardens, a smallobject about an inch high which to his mind exactly answeredto the description of the lion-gate of Mycenæ, only that nowthe lions have lost their heads, whereas in the plas