rink
threw her into a long sound sleep and when she woke she was herself
again, bright and well, hungry for dinner, and ready to do her usual
tasks.

Herself--but not quite the same Toinette that she had been before.
Nobody changes from bad to better in a minute. It takes time for that,
time and effort, and a long struggle with evil habits and tempers. But
there is sometimes a certain minute or day in which people begin to
change, and thus it was with Toinette. The fairy lesson was not lost
upon her. She began to fight with herself, to watch her faults and try
to conquer them. It was hard work; often she felt discouraged, but she
kept on. Week after week and month after month she grew less selfish,
kinder, more obliging than she used to be. When she failed and her old
fractious temper got the better of her, she was sorry and begged every
one's pardon so humbly that they could not but forgive. The mother began
to think that the elves really had bewitched her child. As for the
children they learned to love Toinette as never before, and came to her
with all their pains and pleasures, as children should to a kind older
sister. Each fresh proof of this, every kiss from Jeanneton, every
confidence from Marc, was a comfort to Toinette, for she never forgot
Christmas Day, and felt that no trouble was too much to wipe out that
unhappy recollection. "I think they like me better than they did then,"
she would say; but then the thought came, "Perhaps if I were invisible
again, if they did not know I was there, I might hear something to make
me feel as badly as I did that morning." These sad thoughts were part of
the bitter fruit of the fairy fern-seed.

So with doubts and fears the year went by, and again it was Christmas
Eve. Toinette had been asleep some hours when she was roused by a sharp
tapping at the window pane. Startled, and only half awake, she sat up in
bed and saw by the moonlight a tiny figure outside which she recognized.
It was Thistle drumming with his knuckles on the glass.

"Let me in," cried the dry little voice. So Toinette opened the
casement, and Thistle flew in and perched as before on the coverlet.

"Merry Christmas, my girl," he said, "and a Happy New Year when it
comes. I've brought you a present;" and, dipping into a pouch tied round
his waist, he pulled out a handful of something brown. Toinette knew
what it was in a moment.

"Oh, no," she cried shrinking back. "Don't give me any fern-seeds. They
f