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                            A WONDER BOOK

                                 AND

                           TANGLEWOOD TALES

                          FOR GIRLS AND BOYS

                        BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


    WITH PICTURES BY
    MAXFIELD PARRISH

    NEW YORK
    DUFFIELD & COMPANY
    MCMX

    COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY DUFFIELD & COMPANY

    THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.




[Illustration: JASON AND THE TALKING OAK

(From the original in the collection of Austin M. Purves, Esqu're
Philadelphia)]




Preface

The author has long been of opinion that many of the classical myths
were capable of being rendered into very capital reading for children.
In the little volume here offered to the public, he has worked up half a
dozen of them, with this end in view. A great freedom of treatment was
necessary to his plan; but it will be observed by every one who attempts
to render these legends malleable in his intellectual furnace, that they
are marvellously independent of all temporary modes and circumstances.
They remain essentially the same, after changes that would affect the
identity of almost anything else.

He does not, therefore, plead guilty to a sacrilege, in having sometimes
shaped anew, as his fancy dictated, the forms that have been hallowed by
an antiquity of two or three thousand years. No epoch of time can claim
a copyright in these immortal fables. They seem never to have been made;
and certainly, so long as man exists, they can never perish; but, by
their indestructibility