`` Are they as good as the first ? '' I inquired . `` Better chosen , and better handled , '' replied Eustace Bright . `` You will say so when you read them . '' `` Possibly not , '' I remarked . `` I know from my own experience , that an author 's last work is always his best one , in his own estimate , until it quite loses the red heat of composition . After that , it falls into its true place , quietly enough . But let us adjourn to my study , and examine these new stories . It would hardly be doing yourself justice , were you to bring me acquainted with them , sitting here on this snow bank ! '' So we descended the hill to my small , old cottage , and shut ourselves up in the south-eastern room , where the sunshine comes in , warmly and brightly , through the better half of a winter 's day . Eustace put his bundle of manuscript into my hands ; and I skimmed through it pretty rapidly , trying to find out its merits and demerits by the touch of my fingers , as a veteran story-teller ought to know how to do . It will be remembered that Mr. Bright condescended to avail himself of my literary experience by constituting me editor of the `` Wonder-Book . '' As he had no reason to complain of the reception of that erudite work by the public , he was now disposed to retain me in a similar position with respect to the present volume , which he entitled TANGLEWOOD TALES . Not , as Eustace hinted , that there was any real necessity for my services as introducer , inasmuch as his own name had become established in some good degree of favor with the literary world . But the connection with myself , he was kind enough to say , had been highly agreeable ; nor was he by any means desirous , as most people are , of kicking away the ladder that had perhaps helped him to reach his present elevation . My young friend was willing , in short , that the fresh verdure of his growing reputation should spread over my straggling and half-naked boughs ; even as I have sometimes thought of training a vine , with its broad leafiness , and purple fruitage , over the worm-eaten posts and rafters of the rustic summer house . I was not insensible to the advantages of his proposal , and gladly assured him of my acceptance . Merely from the title of the stories I saw at once that the subjects were not less rich than those of the former volume ; nor did I at all doubt that Mr. Bright 's audacity -LRB- so far as that endowment might avail -RRB- had enabled him to take full advantage of whatever capabilities they offered . Yet , in spite of my experience of his free way of handling them , I did not quite see , I confess , how he could have obviated all the difficulties in the way of rendering them presentable to children . These old legends , so brimming over with everything that is most abhorrent to our Christianized moral sense some of them so hideous , others so melancholy and miserable , amid which the Greek tragedians sought their themes , and moulded them into the sternest forms of grief that ever the world saw ; was such material the stuff that children 's playthings should be made of !
How were they XXXXX be purified ?
So amid at for on over that through to with