mixed with ripe October corn silk. In the first
week of the harvest moon coming up red and changing to yellow and
silver the corn fairies sit by thousands between the corn rows weaving
and stitching the clothes they have to wear next winter, next spring,
next summer.

They sit cross-legged when they sew. And it is a law among them each
one must point the big toe at the moon while sewing the harvest moon
clothes. When the moon comes up red as blood early in the evening they
point their big toes slanting toward the east. Then towards midnight
when the moon is yellow and half way up the sky their big toes are
only half slanted as they sit cross-legged sewing. And after midnight
when the moon sails its silver disk high overhead and toward the west,
then the corn fairies sit sewing with their big toes pointed nearly
straight up.

If it is a cool night and looks like frost, then the laughter of the
corn fairies is something worth seeing. All the time they sit sewing
their next year clothes they are laughing. It is not a law they have
to laugh. They laugh because they are half-tickled and glad because it
is a good corn year.

And whenever the corn fairies laugh then the laugh comes out of the
mouth like a thin gold frost. If you should be lucky enough to see a
thousand corn fairies sitting between the corn rows and all of them
laughing, you would laugh with wonder yourself to see the gold frost
coming from their mouths while they laughed.

Travelers who have traveled far, and seen many things, say that if you
know the corn fairies with a real knowledge you can always tell by the
stitches in their clothes what state they are from.

In Illinois the corn fairies stitch fifteen stitches of ripe corn silk
across the woven corn leaf cloth. In Iowa they stitch sixteen
stitches, in Nebraska seventeen, and the farther west you go the more
corn silk stitches the corn fairies have in the corn cloth clothes
they wear.

In Minnesota one year there were fairies with a blue sash of
corn-flowers across the breast. In the Dakotas the same year all the
fairies wore pumpkin-flower neckties, yellow four-in-hands and yellow
ascots. And in one strange year it happened in both the states of Ohio
and Texas the corn fairies wore little wristlets of white morning
glories.

The traveler who heard about this asked many questions and found out
the reason why that year the corn fairies wore little wristlets of
white morning glories. He said, "Wh