Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid
story by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for
the story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the
best--those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk
twenty times better than most human beings ever do, and where
extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all
like our world of every day. It is so fine to be taken into a country
where it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and the
flowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by just
wishing for it, and are not told that this or that isn't good for them,
and that they'll know better than to want it when they're grown up,
and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happening
in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go in
such an ordinary fashion.

But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like
to listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be
some one who could draw pictures for me while talking--pictures like
those of Tenniel in _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the
Looking-Glass_. How much better we know Alice herself and the White
Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures
than even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not only
draw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. I
want to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaks
and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some
gold and silver too, and not merely black and white--though black and
white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed
me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could
put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't