Excerpt from The Blue Ribbons: A Story of the Last Century Old ladies stepped into ditches, for the express purpose of making your fortune for pulling them out; and knights with charmed swords, and golden talismans, rode over impossible bridges, cut off the monsters countless heads, and carried off the beautiful princess, who was always being left in pawn for her royal father's necessities. Wands that turned poverty into wealth; boots that beat the express train - unknown in those primitive days apples that made your nose grow dreadfully, and pears that pulled it in again, though quite in a friendly way; oracular horses, with the key of the portmanteau always ready in their right ear cheerful birds, full of conversa tion and anecdote, quick at pointing out the wicked sisters, and rescuing the injured sultana from that worst of punishments, which must have been originally devised in America; chariots. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.