ach child's plate there was a pretty present and every one had a basket
of bonbons and cake to carry home.

At four o'clock the fiddlers put up their fiddles and the children went
home; fairies and shepherdesses and pages and princesses all jabbering
gleefully about the splendid time they had had.

But in a short time what consternation there was throughout the city.
When the proud and fond parents attempted to unbutton their children's
dresses, in order to prepare them for bed, not a single costume would
come off. The buttons buttoned again as fast as they were unbuttoned;
even if they pulled out a pin, in it would slip again in a twinkling;
and when a string was untied it tied itself up again into a bowknot. The
parents were dreadfully frightened. But the children were so tired out
they finally let them go to bed in their fancy costumes and thought
perhaps they would come off better in the morning. So Red Riding-hood
went to bed in her little red cloak holding fast to her basket full of
dainties for her grandmother, and Bo-Peep slept with her crook in her
hand.

The children all went to bed readily enough, they were so very tired,
even though they had to go in this strange array. All but the
fairies--they danced and pirouetted and would not be still.

"We want to swing on the blades of grass," they kept saying, "and play
hide and seek in the lily cups, and take a nap between the leaves of the
roses."

The poor charwomen and coal-heavers, whose children the fairies were for
the most part, stared at them in great distress. They did not know what
to do with these radiant, frisky little creatures into which their
Johnnys and their Pollys and Betseys were so suddenly transformed. But
the fairies went to bed quietly enough when daylight came, and were soon
fast asleep.

There was no further trouble till twelve o'clock, when all the children
woke up. Then a great wave of alarm spread over the city. Not one of the
costumes would come off then. The buttons buttoned as fast as they were
unbuttoned; the pins quilted themselves in as fast as they were pulled
out; and the strings flew round like lightning and twisted themselves
into bowknots as fast as they were untied.

And that was not the worst of it; every one of the children seemed to
have become, in reality, the character which he or she had assumed.

The Mayor's daughter declared she was going to tend her geese out in the
pasture, and the shepherdesses sprang out o