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This smell and the trilling of the cricket used to entice us into the kitchen when we were children, and there we used to be told fairy-tales, and we played at kings and queens.... "And where is Cleopatra?" asked Akhsinya hurriedly, breathlessly. "And where is your hat, sir? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg."
The goose would tell fairy-tales, and in the midst of them the brook would tinkle a ballad; a great heavy stone would caper about ludicrously; the rose stealing up affectionately behind him would creep through his locks, and the ivy stroke his careworn forehead. But his melancholy and his gravity were obstinate. His parents were greatly grieved; they did not know what to do.
Nightingales sing night and day, dogs bark in the distance, there are old neglected gardens, sad and poetical estates shut up and deserted where live the souls of beautiful women; old footmen, relics of serfdom, on the brink of the grave; young ladies longing for the most conventional love. All that I see and hear now seems familiar to me from old novels and fairy-tales.
For oddly enough the sun was shining brightly in the garden, though it had long been dark outside. Cherry stood and stared about her in open-eyed amazement. "Dear, dear," she thought to herself, "'tis just like the fairy-tales Gammer tells us winter evenings!" and she began to wonder if she could have got into an enchanted place, and if she should presently see fairies, or enchanted people there.
I see, that, in our day, the life of the working- man, and, in particular, the life of old men, of women, and of children of the working population, is perishing directly from their food, which is utterly inadequate to their fatiguing labor; and that this life of theirs is not free from care as to its very first requirements; and that, alongside of this, the life of the non- laboring classes, to which I belong, is filled more and more, every year, with superfluities and luxury, and becomes more and more free from anxiety, and has finally reached such a point of freedom from care, in the case of its fortunate members, of whom I am one, as was only dreamed of in olden times in fairy-tales, the state of the owner of the purse with the inexhaustible ruble, that is, a condition in which a man is not only utterly released from the law of labor, but in which he possesses the possibility of enjoying, without toil, all the blessings of life, and of transferring to his children, or to any one whom he may see fit, this purse with the inexhaustible ruble.
He started back chilled for a second, and in that second she changed her position, pulling the cushions around her, nestling into them and drawing herself cosily up like a child playing on a mat in front of the fire, while with a face of perfect innocence she looked up as she drew one of her great books nearer, and said in a dreamy voice: "Now we will read fairy-tales, Paul."
The fantastic, misty northern element in his stories was too remote from her clear, southern nature. 'It's all fairy-tales, all written for children! she declared with some contempt. She was vaguely conscious, too, of the lack of poetry in Hoffmann.
The truth may lie very deep down, but it is there, and it is worth seeking, and Celtic fairy-tales, charming as they are, can never afford a satisfactory, or abiding, resting place. I, for one, utterly refuse to accept such as an adequate goal for a life's research. A path that leads but into a Celtic Twilight can only be a by-path, and not the King's Highway!
Call them fairy-tales if you wish to, they all have a reasonableness that must have originated in some mighty mind, and, better than that, they all tell of the Indian's faith in the survival of the best impulses of the human heart, and the ultimate extinction of the worst.
Martie worked over their trays, read fairy-tales to Teddy, read the newspaper to Wallace, said that she felt well, she HAD eaten a good lunch, she WAS sleeping well. When the first suspicion of Wallace's condition came to her she was standing in the kitchen, waiting for a kettle to boil, and staring dully out into a world of frozen bareness.
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