The fairy tale is a poetic recording of the facts of life, an interpretation by the imagination of its hard conditions, an effort to reconcile the spirit which loves freedom and goodness and beauty with its harsh, bare and disappointing conditions. It is, in its earliest form, a spontaneous and instinctive endeavor to shape the facts of the world to meet the needs of the imagination, the cravings of the heart. Classics included in this volume include: One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes, The Magic Mirror, The Enchanted Stag, Hansel and Grethel, The Story of Aladdin, This Story of Ali Baba, The Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, The White Cat, The Golden Goose, The Twelve Brothers, The Fair One With the Golden Locks, Tom Thumb, Blue Beard, Cinderella, Puss In Boots, The Sleeping Beauty In the Wood, Jack and The Bean-Stalk . Hamilton Wright Mabie, (December 13, 1846 - December 31, 1916) was an American essayist, editor, critic, and lecturer.He was born at Cold Spring, N. Y. in 1846. Mabie was the youngest child of Sarah Colwell Mabie who was from a wealthy Scottish-English family and Levi Jeremiah Mabie, whose ancestors were Scots-Dutch. They were early immigrants to New Amsterdam, New Netherland about 1647. Due to business opportunities with the opening of the Erie Canal his family moved to Buffalo, New York when he was approaching school age. At the young age of 16 he passed his college entrance examination, but waited a year before he attended Williams College (1867) and the Columbia Law School (1869). While at Williams, Mabie was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and would serve as the first president of the North-American Interfraternity Conference (formally known as the National Interfraternity Conference He received honorary degrees from his own alma mater, from Union College, and from Western Reserve and Washington and Lee universities. Although he passed his bar exams in 1869 he hated both the study and practice of law. In 1876 he married Jeanette Trivett. In the summer of 1879 he was hired to work at the weekly magazine, Christian Union (renamed The Outlook in 1893), an association that lasted until his death. In 1884, Mabie was promoted to associate editor of the Christian Union and then elected to the Author's Club, whose members included such men of established reputation as George Cary Eggleston, Richard Watson Gilder, Brander Matthews, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. In 1890, a small collection of Mabie's essays which reflected upon life, literature and nature were published as a volume entitled My Study Fire".