bookseller says so, the truth is not in him), but of giving
credit where credit is due. The fairy books have been almost
wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them
from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan,
and other languages.

My part has been that of Adam, according to Mark Twain, in the
Garden of Eden. Eve worked, Adam superintended. I also
superintend. I find out where the stories are, and advise, and,
in short, superintend. I do not write the stories out of my own
head. The reputation of having written all the fairy books (an
European reputation in nurseries and the United States of
America) is 'the burden of an honour unto which I was not born.'
It weighs upon and is killing me, as the general fash of being
the wife of the Lord of Burleigh, Burleigh House by Stamford
Town, was too much for the village maiden espoused by that peer.

Nobody really wrote most of the stories. People told them in all
parts of the world long before Egyptian hieroglyphics or Cretan
signs or Cyprian syllabaries, or alphabets were invented. They
are older than reading and writing, and arose like wild flowers
before men had any education to quarrel over. The grannies told
them to the grandchildren, and when the grandchildren became
grannies they repeated the same old tales to the new generation.
Homer knew the stories and made up the 'Odyssey' out of half a
dozen of them. All the history of Greece till about 800 B.C. is a
string of the fairy tales, all about Theseus and Heracles and
Oedipus and Minos and Perseus is a Cabinet des F‚es, a collection
of fairy tales. Shakespeare took them and put bits of them into
'King Lear' and other plays; he could not have made them up