was on April 1, the green young year's beginning, that Mab arrived in
England. She had hired a seagull--no, the seagull offered his services
for nothing; I was forgetting that it was not an English, but a
Polynesian seagull--to take her across. She did not altogether admire
the missionaries, as we have seen, in their proceedings, the fact being
that she had grown used to Polynesians in the course of the centuries
she had spent among them, and the missionaries were such a remarkable
contrast to the Polynesians. But their advent was certainly a source
of mental improvement to her, for fairies as we know, understand things
almost by instinct, and Queen Mab, one evening, chanced to overhear a
good deal of the missionaries' conversation. She learned, for
instance, the precise meanings, and the bearings on modern theology
and metaphysics, of such words as kathenotheism, hagiography,
transubstantiation, eschatology, Positivist, _noumenony begriffy
vorstellung, Paulisimus, wissenschaft_, and others, quite new to her,
and of great benefit in general conversation.

With this additional knowledge she started on the voyage, leaving her
faithful subjects to take care of the island and themselves, till she
came back to tell them whether their return to England would ever be
practicable. She landed in Great Britain, then, on April 1, and the
seagull went across to the Faroe Islands and waited there till the time
which she had appointed for him to come and carry her back to Polynesia.

Queen Mab found England a good deal altered. There were still fairy
circles in the grass; but they were attributed, not to fairy dances, but
to unscientific farming and the absence of artificial phosphates. The
country did not smell of April and May, but of brick-kilns and the
manufacture of chemicals. The rivers, which she had left bright and
clear, were all black and poisonous. Water for drinking purposes was
therefore supplied by convoys from the Apollinaris and other foreign
wells, and it was thought that, if a war broke out, the natives of
England would die of thirst. This was not the only disenchantment of
Queen Mab. She found that in Europe she was an anachronism. She did
not know, at first, what the word meant, but the sense of it gradually
dawned upon her. Now there is always something uncomfortable about being
an anachronism; but still people may become accustomed to it, and even
take a kind of a pride in it, if they are only anachronisms on t