gifts from everybody who knows them.

Now this is Fairy Land, the dear sweet land of Once Upon a Time,
where there is constant light, and summer days, and everlasting
flowers, and pleasant fields and streams, and long dreams
without rough waking, and ease of life, and all things strange
and beautiful; where nobody wonders at anything that may happen;
where good fairies are ever on the watch to help those whom they
love; where youth abides, and there is no pain or death, and all
trouble fades away, and whatever seems hard is made easy, and
all things that look wrong come right in the end, and truth and
goodness have their perpetual triumph, and the world is ever
young.

And Fairy Land is always the same, and always has been, whether
it is close to us--so close that we may enter it in a moment--or
whether it is far off; in the stories that have come to us from
the most ancient days, and the most distant lands, and in those
which kind and clever story-tellers write for us now. It is the
same in the legends of the mysterious East, as old as the
beginning of life; the same in the glowing South, in the myths
of ancient Greece; the same in the frozen regions of the
Scandinavian North, and in the forests of the great Teuton land,
and in the Islands of the West; the same in the tales that
nurses tell to the little ones by the fireside on winter
evenings, and in the songs that mothers sing to hush their babes
to sleep; the same in the delightful folk-lore that Grimm has
collected for us, and that dear Hans Andersen has but just
ceased to tell.