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Updated: May 7, 2025
‘Jack the Giant-killer 7,943 Ditto and Bean-stalk 8,621 Ditto and Eleven Brothers 2,845 Ditto and Jill 1,998 Total 21,407
Daisy threaded her needle for her at night when her keen eyes began to fail, and while she made the old clo' into new, Daisy read aloud her English story-books. Natalya took an absorbing interest in these nursery tales, heard for the first time in her second childhood. 'Jack the Giant-killer, 'Aladdin, 'Cinderella, they were all delightful novelties.
My father bought me many tragical ditties; such as Chevy Chace, the Children in the Wood, Death and the Lady, and, which were infinitely the richest gems in my library, Robin Hood's Garland, and the History of Jack the Giant-killer.
Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis? I am not joking, but writing quite seriously, when I say that I would much rather order a hundred copies of Jack the Giant-killer for our schools than a hundred copies of any grammar of rhetoric or logic that ever was written."
He had lived too long with our go-ahead brethren who stride the world on the other side the Atlantic with the seven-leagued boots of the Giant-killer, not to have caught their glorious fever for reading. But it was for a reading wholly different from that which was familiar to Leonard. The books he read must be new; to read old books would have seemed to him going back in the world.
And then you and me wad gang and pouss our fortunes, like the folk i' the daft auld tales about Jock the Giant-killer and Valentine and Orson; and we wad come back to merry Scotland, as the sang says, and I wad tak to the stilts again, and turn sic furs on the bonny rigs o' Milnwood holms, that it wad be worth a pint but to look at them."
And in our own islands we have them too, for the traditions of English giants, and ogres, and dwarfs still linger in the tales of Jack the Giant-killer and Jack and the Bean-stalk, and Hop o' my Thumb; and we have also the elves whom Shakspeare draws for us so delightfully in "Midsummer Night's Dream" and in "The Merry Wives of Windsor"; and there are the Devonshire pixies; and the Scottish fairies and the brownies the spirits who do the work of the house or the farm and the Irish "good people;" and the Pooka, which comes in the form of a wild colt; and the Leprechaun, a dwarf who makes himself look like a little old man, mending shoes; and the Banshee, which cries and moans when great people are going to die.
Even when, by some dexterous trick, Tom would show them two or three acorns under a leaf where their reason told them there could be none, and then as mysteriously cause the same acorns to disappear, the stony faces looking on never changed a muscle though at heart they were probably quite as astounded as the Welsh monster was supposed to be when Jack the Giant-Killer, performed such wonderful feats with hasty-pudding.
Here you will find the witch who turns men into swine, and the man who bores out the big foolish giant's eye, and the cap of darkness, and the shoes of swiftness, that were worn later by Jack the Giant-Killer.
'And how comes that? said Bertram. 'Ou, I dinna ken; I daur say it's nonsense, but they say she has gathered the fern-seed, and can gang ony gate she likes, like Jock the Giant-killer in the ballant, wi' his coat o' darkness and his shoon o' swiftness.
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