So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why.

Remember that.

You like to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell.

It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when he sat scratching on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he hunted, was proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious human nature as you--that he was the kinsman of every painter and sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful works of God.
Sometimes, again, especially in Denmark, these savages have left behind upon the shore mounds of dirt, which are called there "kjokken-moddings"-- "kitchen-middens" as they would say in Scotland, "kitchen-dirtheaps" as we should say here down South--and a very good name for them that is; for they are made up of the shells of oysters, cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, and other shore-shells besides, on which those poor creatures fed; and mingled with them are broken bones of beasts, and fishes, and birds, and flint knives, and axes, and sling stones; and here and there hearths, on which they have cooked their meals in some rough way.

And that is nearly all we know about them; but this we know from the size of certain of the shells, and from other reasons which you would not understand, that these mounds were made an enormous time ago, when the water of the Baltic Sea was far more salt than it is now.
But what has all this to do with my fairy tale?
This:-- Suppose that these people, after all, had been fairies?
I am in earnest.