returned the boy unabashed. 'By George,
I'll give you the jolliest licking!'

'Hi, there she goes! Seize her!' he shouted distractedly, and the
unlucky Palaeonto-theologist rushed after a butterfly-net, while Queen
Mab, in unutterable indignation, rose slowly into the air, followed
by the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new
departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they
were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened his
beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy but scientific
delight, the word--

'Reaction!'

But Queen Mab, after this crowning insult, was fain to depart from
Britain and renounce the higher civilisation. In the Councils of the
New Democracy she had no place. Church and State abjured her: the rising
generation needed no fairies, but was content with football and cricket,
'Treasure Island,' and the Latin Grammar. Education, Philosophy, and
the Philistines had made of the island she once loved well a wilderness
wherein no fairy might henceforth furl its wings.

She said 'good-bye' to the Owl, who shed one tear at parting, and to
all the loyal birds, and went back to Samoa. But alas! Samoa, like
Great Britain, was no longer any place for her. It was annexed: it was
evangelised. The natives of it were going to church; they were going
to Sunday School; they were going to heaven. They were sending their
children to be educated at English colleges: they were translating
Tennyson and Wesley's sermons, and learning the catechism, and reading
the Testament in the original Greek, and wearing high-crowned hats and
paper collars. There was no end of the things they were doing, and they
had no time for fairies.

Queen Mab summoned her Court together in despair, and left for one of
the Admiralty Islands. There, till the civilisation that dogs the steps
of the old folk-lore has driven her thence--with constitutions, and
microscopes, and a higher Pantheism that leaves the older Pantheism
in the lurch, and other advantages of the nineteenth century--she is
secure. We trust that she is also happy, and that the shadow of the
approaching hour when she will be ultimately reduced by scientific
theologians to a symbol of some deeper verity, the conception of men
whose understandings could not cope, like ours, with abstract truth, is
not cast heavily upon her path. For she knows well, now, that her day is
over, that she is too tangible by