Twenty-two tales from the Netherlands: the boy who cast the golden shoes, the kabouters who worked at night, the woman with three hundred and sixty-six children, and the ice king who owned the winter. Griffis had lived in Japan and Holland as a teacher and gathered these where they were still told. The Dutch fairy world is domestic - mermaids in canals, elves in kitchens - and the stories are shorter and drier than the German ones. Fifty-six plates of Dutch landscape and village life by painters including Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, from 1624 to 1918, keep the water mills, wooded paths and green meadows of these tales before the eye.