I've been reading Oscar Wilde lately, and when the Selfish Giant heard the little linnet bird singing outside his window, the text goes "What did he see?" and I was fully prepared to turn the page and see the little linnet bird dying in hideous fashion, as Wilde's birds seem wont to do, but for once the bird lived. The Giant, however, did not, and he went out in as mawkish a fashion as dead things in Wilde fairy stories tend to do. For all that, it's still a nice little story, although the allegory at the end beats one over the head even harder than Aslan, and I didn't know that was possible.