My Dear Young Folks,
Here are some more stories from the wonderful Annals of Fairyland. How they were first told at the Court of King Oberon, and how they came to be recorded you will learn at the beginning, and much as you love the little people you will, I think, like them even better when you have learned all that this volume has to tell. Mr William Canton has told you the stories properly belonging to “The Reign of King Herla,” Mr J. M. Gibbon showed you how a famous merry old soul and his court found entertainment in story-telling in “The Reign of King Cole,” and now it is my pleasant privilege to put before you, from the inexhaustible Annals, those tales which properly belong to “The Reign of King Oberon.”
Of course you may have already met some of these stories before, for most of our best writers have been made free of Fairyland and have written of the wonderful things they learned there; Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm have long since been famous for all that they have told of their visits to the marvellous land, and some of the stories which they brought back will be found to belong to the reign of Oberon and Titania, while others have been told by Ben Jonson, by Thomas Hood, by Charles Perrault, by Thomas Crofton Croker, by Douglas Jerrold, by Benjamin Thorpe and by Sir George Dasent—but old or new all have the perennial youthfulness of the fairies themselves, and as long as we can truly enjoy them we shall not grow old.
The Editor.