them?"

"Do--please!" the others said.

"You won't run away again?"

"No--indeed we won't. Please do. Won't you?"

"Yes, with pleasure; but you mustn't forget your promise, you know."

We said we wouldn't, and he went to a puddle and came back with water
in a cup which he had made out of a leaf, and blew upon it and threw it
out, and it was a lump of ice the shape of the cup. We were astonished
and charmed, but not afraid any more; we were very glad to be there, and
asked him to go on and do some more things. And he did. He said he would
give us any kind of fruit we liked, whether it was in season or not. We
all spoke at once;

"Orange!"

"Apple!"

"Grapes!"

"They are in your pockets," he said, and it was true. And they were of
the best, too, and we ate them and wished we had more, though none of us
said so.

"You will find them where those came from," he said, "and everything
else your appetites call for; and you need not name the thing you wish;
as long as I am with you, you have only to wish and find."

And he said true. There was never anything so wonderful and so
interesting. Bread, cakes, sweets, nuts--whatever one wanted, it was
there. He ate nothing himself, but sat and chatted, and did one curious
thing after another to amuse us. He made a tiny toy squirrel out of
clay, and it ran up a tree and sat on a limb overhead and barked down
at us. Then he made a dog that was not much larger than a mouse, and it
treed the squirrel and danced about the tree, excited and barking, and
was as alive as any dog could be. It frightened the squirrel from tree
to tree and followed it up until both were out of sight in the forest.
He made birds out of clay and set them free, and they flew away,
singing.

At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.

"An angel," he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and clapped
his hands and made it fly away.

A kind of awe fell upon us when we heard him say that, and we were
afraid again; but he said we need not be troubled, there was no occasion
for us to be afraid of an angel, and he liked us, anyway. He went on
chatting as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he talked he made
a crowd of little men and women the size of your finger, and they went
diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards
square in the grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it,
the women mixing the mortar and carrying it up the scaffoldin