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The Tanglewood Tales [3 Stories From a Wonder Book and 3 From Tanglewood Tales].
The Tanglewood Tales - 3 Stories From a Wonder Book and 3 From Tanglewood Tales Author:Nathaniel Hawthorne General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1884 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: The Golden Touch. NCE upon a time there lived a very rich man, and a king besides, whose name was Midas; and he had a little daughter, whom nobody but myself ever heard of, and whose name I either never knew, or have entirely forgotten. So, because I love odd names for little girls, I choose to call her Marygold. This King Midas was fonder of gold than of anything else in the world. He valued his royal crown chiefly because it was composed of that precious metal. If he loved anything better, or half so well, it was the one little maiden who played so merrily around her father's footstool. But the more Midas loved his daughter, the more did he desire and seek for wealth. He thought, foolish man! that the best thing he could possibly do for this dear child would be to bequeath her the largest pile of yellow glistening coins that had ever been heaped together since the world was made. Thus he gave all his thoughts and all his time to this one purpose. If he ever happened to gaze for an instant at the gold-tinted clouds of sunset, he wished that they were real gold, and that they could be squeezed safely into his strong-box. When little Marygold ran to meet him, with a bunch of buttercups and dandelions, he used to say, " Pooh, pooh, child ! If these flowers were as golden as they look, they would be worth the plucking !" And yet, in his earlier days, before he was so entirely possessed with this insane desire for riches, King Midas had shown a great taste for flowers. He had planted a garden, in which grew the biggest, the most beautiful, and the sweetest roses that any mortal ever saw or smelt. These ...« less