Once upon a time, in the middle of winter when the snowflakes were falling like feathers on the earth, a Queen sat at a window framed in black ebony and sewed. And as she sewed and gazed out to the white landscape, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell on the snow outside... Andrew Lang began gathering fairy tales in the late nineteenth century with the aim of conserving 'the old stories that have pleased so many generations'...