ASHIEPATTLE: OR HANS SEEKS HIS LUCK 53 



itself. How feeble, how futile it all seemed, when the 

 needs of another generation brought us back to what had 

 once been familiar as the other hand ; land wherein and 

 folk amid whom we had been reared in childhood had 

 become strange, " rent' als ez si gelogen," and our old 

 comrades greeted us but coldly. Yet, as one read on 

 to little nestling forms keenly intent on their land of 

 reality, a new sense and a new life came into Mdrchen- 

 land. It became a reality for the elder, too ; its 

 customs and characters, if distorted and obscured, were 

 again actualities ; they described, with perhaps tedious 

 reiteration, great features of an early stage of our race's 

 civilisation. Mdrchenland told the same tale as word- 

 lore and folklore ; there had been an age when civilisa- 

 tion was much more the work of women than of men, 

 and when the social customs as to marriage and pro- 

 perty were very different from those of to-day. It is 

 to this aspect of Mdrchenland that I wish to turn in 

 this essay. I shall be satisfied if it leads any of my 

 readers to take up their Grimm again with an interest 

 and delight akin to what I myself feel, and to what we 

 all felt in those days of long ago, when the ideal was 

 the real for us, and the real was a trivial and stupid 

 world with which we had small occasion to fash 

 ourselves. 



Is Mdrchenland after all a place in which every- 

 thing is turned topsy-turvy to the delight of children, 

 or may not much of children's pleasure in it arise from 

 an unconscious sympathy between the child and the 

 thought and custom of the childhood of civilisation ? 

 In the life and feeling of the child the mother and the 



