A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a tale, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as sacred texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual circumstances of the time and individual child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better. A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or arousing evil desire. To prove the latter, one would have shown in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often guilty of cruelty than those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy stories. Often, however, this arises from the child having heard the story once, familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered. There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively tree, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist, and that, instead of indulging (纵容) his fantasies (幻想) in fairy tales, the child should be taught how to adapt to reality by studying history and mechanics. I find such people, I must confess, so unsympathetic and peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a broomstick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved gift-Mend. No fairy story ever claimed to be a description of the external world and no normal child has ever believed that it was. How should fairy stories be told to children according to the author?