and sophisticated imagination in the metamorphosis by the blue moon of a pale country, is no enemy to realness: "All the world seemed carved out of blue stone. . . . The white blossoms of a cherry-tree had become changed into turquoise, and the tossing spray of a fountain as it drifted and swung was like a column of blue fire."
In the tradition of the house that Jack built, and of the stick that beat the dog, the fire that burned the stick, the water that put out the fire, there is newness in the evolving of the Princes birth-day present.
"His fairygodmother had sent him a bird, but when he pulled its tail it became a lizard, and when he pulled the lizard's tail it became a mouse, and when he pulled the mouse's tail, it became a cat. . . . He pulled the cat's tail and it became a dog, and when he pulled the dog's it became a goat; and so it went on till he got to a cow. And he pulled the cow's tail and it became a camel, and he pulled the camel's tail and it became an elephant, and still not being contented, he pulled the elephant's tail and it became a guinea-pig. Now a guinea-pig has no tail to pull, so it remained a guinea-pig." Intricately perfect as a pierced ivory mosque, The Prince with the Nine Sorrows is a tale of nine sisters enchanted into peahens. Eight having refused to regain their identity at the sacrifice of their brother's life, the ninth after pecking out his heart, pecked out her own in remorse, substituting it for his and he, "taking up his own still beating heart, laid it into the place of hers so that which was which they themselves did not know."
In these two books there is a disparity in favour of Moonshine and Clover, there being perhaps but one story in a Doorway in Fairyland, The Ratcatcher's Daughter, which may surely be depended upon to remain in the mind. In this most civilized obverse of fox-hunting ethics, a gnome having got himself caught in a trap with a view to entrapping his captor, is found apparently "wriggling and beating to be free." As the price of freedom, he consents to give the ratcatcher all the gold in the world and to make his daughter pure gold so that the king's son will marry her. Then when the ratcatcher finds that the prince will marry her only in the event that she can be made natural, in order to effect a retransfor-
