sprang up in a quarter of an hour, with thorns long enough to impale unworthy suitors; sometimes it was the highroad out to the world, upon which many a stout hero set foot to seek fortune. The merry gallant history of "Tom Thumb," fairy fledgeling, wizard-fostered, king's jester and doughty knightling, is referred to the magical days of Merlin and the chivalrous court of Arthur. We find him, too, versatile little imp, in his mother's practical pudding bowl, in the red cow's mouth, in a giant's stomach, inside a fish; and each place is capital setting for him. Who says that giants are figments of the imagination? The people of Cornwall record that it was in their land that Jack killed the giant, and they point out a castle built on a rock standing in the sea as the stronghold of the monster. (Let the folklorists find in this primitive belief, if they will; let us find, also, artistic fitness.) What a delightful plausibility the tale takes on from this minutely recorded geographical setting, as delightful in its way as the vague long ago and dim place of other tales! Here, in the apparently artless tale, is the artistic device by which Defoe hoodwinked the England of his day into believing that Robinson Crusoe was fact and not truer fiction.
Note the appropriateness in change of scene; Andersen's "Ugly Duckling," among the modern
