Oldal 17 [17]
INTRODUCTION
By KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
eee was once a green book, deliciously thick, with
gilt-edged pages and the name of the author in gilt
script on the front cover.
Like an antique posy ring, it was a “box of jewels, shop
of rarities’’; it was a veritable Pandora’s box, and if you laid
warm, childish hands upon it and held it pressed close to
your ear, you could hear, as Pandora did, soft rustlings,
murmurings, flutterings, and whisperings from the fairy folk
within. For this was a fairy book—Edouard Laboulaye’s
“Tales,” and its heroes and heroines became first the daily
companions, and then the lifetime possession, of the two
little girls to whom it belonged.
From the New England village where it was originally
given to them, it traveled to the far West and its tales were
told to countless immigrant children of San Francisco, whose
great eyes opened wider still as they listened, breathless, to
stories beloved by their ancestors. In later years the green
volume journeyed by clumsy, rattling stage and rawboned
nags to Mexico, and the extraordinary adventures of “Yvon
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