FAIRIES 



212S 



FAIRIES 



DAIRIES, fair'iz. In James M. Barrie's 

 charming play of Peter Pan, when Peter ad- 

 vances to the footlights and says appealingly, 

 "Do you believe in fairies?" grown people as 

 well as children cry, "Yes! Yes!" and mean it, 

 too. For the moment they do believe in fai- 

 ries the little beings are too beautiful, too 

 delightful not to be real. To children at cer- 

 tain stages of their experience they are the 

 most enticing, the most important inhabitants 

 of the earth. Every flower cup may be a 

 fairy's bedroom; every mushroom is a fairy's 

 dining-table. The gauzy-winged butterflies are 

 the fairies' airships, and very often in the 

 woods and fields of a summer's morning may 

 be seen the rings where their tiny feet have 

 danced all night. True, the most watchful 

 child has never caught a glimpse of one, but 

 almost every child has felt many a time that 

 he might have seen one had he turned about 

 just a little more quickly. As the little girl in 

 the song says: 



I know whenever fairies pass, 

 Because they lightly bend the grass ; 

 I never see them, so I think, 

 They must go by just when I wink. 



Fairies do not like the cold, so they are not to 

 be found in the fields in the winter, but there 

 is one place where they can always be found, 

 and ready indeed are they at all times to 

 come out and play with the delighted children. 

 From between the covers of the favorite fairy- 

 tale book they glide, and with a wave of their 

 wands carry the children with them to won- 

 derful countries "that never were on land or 

 sea." There is Cinderella's fairy godmother 

 she does not look much like a fairy, but what 

 a powerful one she is, with her wand that can 

 turn pumpkins into chariots! And Jack's 

 fairy that he met at the top of the beanstalk 

 the beautiful lady with the star-tipped wand 

 what could he ever have done without her 

 advice? Sometimes the fairies in these won- 

 derful tales carry away a child from its wicked 



parents and bring it up happily among them- 

 selves; sometimes they bear away to their 

 fairy home some man who deserves punish- 

 ment, and there make his life a burden to 

 him; or they make it possible for a poor little 

 girl who is out tending the goats, and never 

 has enough to eat, to spread for herself each 

 day a fairy table with everything on it that 

 she likes the most. One thing may be de- 

 pended on the true fairies are always found 

 assisting the good people, and no one who is 

 cruel or cross or greedy ever need look for 

 any help from them. If the moral of these 

 tales be very obvious, the children do not 

 mind; that is the way, it seems to them, that 

 the world should be managed. 



Fairies may be of almost any size or ap- 

 pearance; indeed, they can look like anything 

 they choose, changing between one moment 

 and the next. A favorite device of a fairy 

 who wants to find out about the worthiness or 

 unworthiness of a person is to appear as a 

 poor old woman seeking aid, and then, when 

 she has found out all she wants to know, to 

 throw off her disguise. The Irish, who seem 

 to know the most about fairies, declare that 

 they prefer to appear as tiny men and women, 

 the men in gay attire of 



Green jacket, red cap 

 And white owl's feather ; 



the little ladies in gauzy gowns and bonnets 

 made of flower petals. Long after children 

 have ceased to believe that there actually are 

 fairies they love to read of their marvelous 

 doings and to satisfy their inborn sense of 

 justice by gloating over the way the fairies 

 always reward the good and punish the evil 

 in the end. 



Should Fairy Tales Be Told? There are 

 people who do not believe in telling fairy 

 stories to children, but the weight of opinion 

 is all in the other direction. Educators hold 

 that, besides giving pleasure, such stories per- 

 form a real service in stimulating the imagina- 



