When all the novelists and spinners of elaborate fictions have been read and judged, we shall find that the peasant and the nurse are still unsurpassed as mere narrators. They are the guardians of that treasury of legend which comes to us from the very childhood of nations; they and their tales are the abstract and brief chronicles, not of an age merely, but of the whole race of man. It is theirs to keep alive the great art of telling stories as a thing wholly apart from and independent of the art of writing stories, and to pass on their art to children and to children's children. They abide in a realm of their own, in blessed isolation from that world of professional authors and their milk-and-water books "for children."