Is all our Life, then, but a dream

      Seen faintly in the golden gleam

      Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?

      Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,

      Or laughing at some raree-show,

      We flutter idly to and fro.

      Man’s little Day in haste we spend,

      And, from its merry noontide, send

      No glance to meet the silent end.

Preface

      Table of Contents

One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket was drawn by ‘Miss Alice Havers.’ I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.

      The descriptions, here and here, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.

      The Chapters, headed ‘Fairy-Sylvie’ and ‘Bruno’s Revenge,’ are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for ‘Aunt Judy’s Magazine,’ which she was then editing.

It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story. As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me—who knows how?—with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought—as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the ‘flint’ of one’s own mind by the ‘steel’ of a friend’s chance remark—but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, à propos of nothing—specimens of that hopelessly