Six Greek myths retold to a group of children by a student at a Berkshire farmhouse: Midas and the golden touch, Pandora's box, Perseus, Bellerophon and the chimaera. Hawthorne wrote it in 1851 in the Berkshires, the same year as "The House of the Seven Gables", and insisted that the myths could be told for children without moralising. Midas's daughter is his own addition and the best thing in the book. Forty-two plates of summer meadows, elms, and warm family gardens by painters such as Eastman Johnson and George Inness give Hawthorne's fireside tales a golden, sunlit world to live in.