52 ASHIEPATTLE: OR HANS SEEKS HIS LUCK 



Da ward die Hochzeit gefeiert, und der Dummling erbte das 

 Reich, und lebte lange Zeit vergniigt mit seiner Gemahlin. 



Now in the days of our childhood we read this 

 theme varied in a hundred different ways, but always 

 felt it quite natural and fitting that Hans should find 

 his luck, marry his princess, and become heir to the 

 kingdom. It did not strike us as peculiar that kings 

 were as plentiful as blackberries ; we should have con- 

 sidered it quite immoral for the kingdom to have gone 

 to anybody but the king's daughter, and, being demo- 

 crats as all children must be, we thought it most proper 

 that the princess should only act as a conduit pipe to 

 convey the kingdom to Hans the brave, stout, kindly 

 Hans, the son of the people. The land of Mdrchen had 

 its own customs, its own laws of descent, its own pro- 

 fusion of kings ; it was quite reasonable that it should 

 be largely at the mercy of mysterious old w r omen, or 

 subject to the whims of princesses. It was all intense 

 reality to us, and such historic facts as the law of 

 primogeniture, descent in the male line, the court ruled 

 by soldier and priest, and not by princess and old 

 woman, had never entered our field of view. Mdrchen- 

 land was the real land of our childhood, and its customs 

 and characters the witch, the king's daughter, Hans, 

 and the giant became impressed upon us as the actuali- 

 ties well, if not of life immediately around us, still of 

 another world only slightly removed in either space or 

 time. 



And what became of Mdrchenland f It faded 

 away before a world of grammar, history, and geo- 

 graphy, a hundred times more idle and unreal than 



