The Sampler Platter: A Little Bit of Everything

by Susan Skylark

This is a book of contrasts, a stewpot wherein anything and everything might lurk with each spoonful a different taste: high adventure and complete nonsense, serious quests and silly meanderings, real poetry and doggerel verse, one moment grave as death and blithe as a lark the next. As in life, the world of story and Faerie in particular is a varicolored, ever shifting landscape of joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, adventure and quietude. Each story is preceded by a bit of verse or a quotation that may or may not be relevant, many of them are inspired by old nursery rhymes as one wonders what came of the original tale beyond the little passed down from time immemorial to the wondering hearts of children through the ages. Life is a story and with these bits and pieces of story, this crazy quilt of whimsy as it were, perhaps it will add a little more wonder to your own.

  Up the airy mountains,

  Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting

  For fear of little men;

  Wee folk, good folk,

  Trooping all together;

  Green jacket, red cap,

  And white owl’s feather!

  ~William Allingham, ‘The Fairies’~