light, and their dance
of pied beauty under the moon, they have made all their own.

I have ridden many times down into this glen; and slowly up among the
beeches and oaks into the lanes again, hoping and believing that, some
day, I should see a fairy take shape to my thick mortal vision; and
to-day, at last, I have seen.

I heard it first about half-way up the wood, a silvery voice piping out
very true what seemed like mortal words, not quite to be caught.
Resolved not to miss it this time, I got off quietly and tied my mare
to a tree. Then, tiptoeing in the damp leaves which did not rustle, I
stole up till I caught sight of it, from behind an oak.

It was sitting in yellow bracken as high as its head, under a birch-tree
that had a few branches still gold-feathered. It seemed to be clothed in
blue, and to be swaying as it sang. There was something in its arms, as
it might be a creature being nursed. Cautiously I slipped from that tree
to the next, till I could see its face, just like a child's,
fascinating, very, very delicate, the little open mouth poised and
shaped ever so neatly to the words it was singing; the eyes wide apart
and ever so wide open, fixed on nothing mortal. The song, and the little
body, and the spirit in the eyes, all seemed to sway--sway together,
like a soft wind that goes sough-sough, swinging, in the tops of the
ferns. And now it stretched out one arm, and now the other, beckoning in
to it those to which it was singing; so that one seemed to feel the
invisible ones stealing up closer and closer.

These were the words which came so silvery and slow through that little
mouth: "Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hussh!"

It seemed as if the very rabbits must come and sit-up there, the jays
and pigeons settle above; everything in all the wood gather. Even one's
own heart seemed to be drawn in by those beckoning arms, and the slow
enchantment of that tinkling voice, and the look in those eyes, which,
lost in the unknown, were seeing no mortal glen, but only that mazed
wood, where friendly wild things come, who have no sound to their
padding, no whirr to the movement of their wings; whose gay whisperings
have no noise, whose eager shapes no colour--the fairy dream-wood of the
unimaginable.

"Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hus-s-h!"

For just a moment I could see that spirit company, ghosts of the ferns
and leaves, of butterflies and bees and birds, and four-footed things
innumerable, ghosts of the wind, the sun-be