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.

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 itself, they are legitimate subjects for every age to clothe with its own garniture of manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its own morality. In the present version they may have lost much of their classical aspect (or, at all events, the author has not been careful to preserve it), and have, perhaps, assumed a Gothic or romantic guise.

In performing this pleasant task,—for it has been really a task fit for hot weather, and one of the most agreeable, of a literary kind, which he ever undertook,—the author has not always thought it necessary to write downward, in order to meet the comprehension of children. He has generally suffered the theme to soar, whenever such was its tendency, and when he himself was buoyant enough to follow without an effort. Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling, so long as it is simple, likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them.

Lenox, July 15, 1851.

Contents

Preface

A WONDER BOOK

THE GORGON'S HEAD
THE GOLDEN TOUCH
THE PARADISE OF CHILDREN
THE THREE GOLDEN APPLES
THE MIRACULOUS PITCHER
THE CHIMÆRA

TANGLEWOOD TALES

THE WAYSIDE
THE MINOTAUR
THE PYGMIES
THE DRAGON'S TEETH
CIRCE'S PALACE
THE POMEGRANATE SEEDS
THE GOLDEN FLEECE

Illustrations

Jason and the Talking Oak

Pandora

Atlas

Bellerophon by the Fountain of Pirene

The Fountain of Pirene

Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth

Circe's Palace

Proserpina

Jason and his Teacher

The Argonauts in Quest of the Golden Fleece

A Wonder Book

THE GORGON'S HEAD

Tanglewood Porch

Introductory to "The Gorgon's Head"

Beneath