THE GORGON’S HEAD
then we can dream about them awake. So I hope he will tell us one this very minute.’
‘Thank you, my little Cowslip,’ said Eustace; ‘certainly you shall have the best story I can think of, if it were only for defending me so well from that naughty Primrose. But, children, I have already told you so many fairy tales, that I doubt whether there is a single one which you have not heard at least twice over. I am afraid you will fall asleep in reality, if I repeat any of them again.’
‘No, no, no!’ cried Blue Eye, Periwinkle, Plantain, and half a dozen others. ‘We like a story all the better for having heard it two or three times before.’
And it is a truth, as regards children, that a story seems often to deepen its mark in their interest, not merely by two or three, but by numberless repetitions. But Eustace Bright, in the exuberance of his resources, scorned to avail himself of an advantage which an older story-teller would have been glad to grasp at.
‘It would be a great pity,’ said he, ‘if a man of my learning (to say nothing of original fancy) could not find a new story every day, year in and year out, for children such as you. I will tell you one of the nursery tales that were made for the amusement of our great old grandmother, the Earth, when she was a child in frock and pinafore. There are a hundred such; and it is a wonder to me that they have not long ago been put into picture-books for little girls and boys. But, instead of that, old gray-bearded grandsires pore over them in musty volumes of Greek, and puzzle themselves with trying to find out when, and how, and for what they were made.’
‘Well, well, well, well, Cousin Eustace!’ cried all the
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