be
sure of the approbation of its fellow-men. I should create a wrong
impression were I to enlarge upon this branch of my subject; I should
make my readers call fairies shameful when as a fact they know not the
meaning of shame, or reprove them for shamelessness when, indeed, they
are luckily without it. I shall make bold to say once for all that as
it is absurd to call the lightning cruel, so it is absurd to call
shameful those who know nothing about the deformity. No one can know
what love means who has not seen the fairies at their loving--and so
much for that.

[Footnote 12: I saw an extraordinary case of that, where a male came
suddenly before a mated pair, asserted himself and took her to himself
incontinent. There was no fighting. He stood and looked. The period of
suspense was breathless but not long.]

The laws which govern the appearance of fairies to mankind or their
commerce with men and women seem to be conditioned by the ability of
men to perceive them. The senses of men are figuratively speaking
lenses coloured or shaped by personality. How are we to know the form
and pressure of the great river Enipeus, whose shape, for the love of
Tyro, Poseidon took? And so the accounts of fairy appearance, of fairy
shape, size, vesture, will vary in the measure of the faculty of the
percipient. To me, personally, the fairies seem to go in gowns of
yellow, grey, russet or green, but mostly in yellow or grey. The
Oreads or Spirits of the hills vary. In winter their vesture is
yellow, in summer it is ash-green. The Dryad whom I saw was in grey,
the colour of the lichened oak-tree out of which she gleamed. The
fairies in a Norman forest had long brown garments, very close and
clinging, to the ankles. They were belted, and their hair was loose.
But that is invariable. I never saw a fairy with snooded or tied up
hair. They are always bare-footed. Despoina is the only fairy I ever
saw in any other colour than those I have named. She always wears
blue, of the colour of the shadows on a moonlight night, very
beautiful. She, too, wears sandals, which they say the Satyrs weave
for her as a tribute. They lay them down where she has been or is
likely to be; for they never see her.

But this matter of vesture is really a digression: I have more
important matter in hand, and that is to consider the intercourse
between fairy and mortal, as it is governed by appearance. How does a
man, for instance, gain a fairy-wife? How does a w