When all the novelists and spinners of elaborate fictions havebeen read and judged, we shall find that the peasant and the nurseare still unsurpassed as mere narrators. They are the guardians ofthat treasury of legend which comes to us from the very childhoodof nations; they and their tales are the abstract and brief chronicles,not of an age merely, but of the whole race of man. It is theirs tokeep alive the great art of telling stories as a thing wholly apartfrom and independent of the art of writing stories, and to pass ontheir art to children and to children's children. They abide in arealm of their own, in blessed isolation from that world of professionalauthors and their milk-and-water books "for children."