came by. His fierce eye was drawn by the
fluttering purple thing. It had no power to escape. He tore its crumpled
wings from its feathery form, and made of it a meal. But before dying it
had time to say, "Oh, Mother Carey, now I know that your way was the
best."

TALE 30

The Green Fairy with the Long Train

Some fairies are Brownies and some are Greenies, and of all that really
and truly dance in the moonlight right here in America, Luna Greenie
seems the most wonderful; and this is her history:

Once upon a time there was a seed pearl that dropped from the robe of a
green fairy. It stuck on the leaf of a butternut tree till one warm day
Mother Carey, who knows all the wild things and loves them all, touched
it with her magic wand, called Hatch-awake, and out of the seed pearl
came an extraordinarily ugly little dwarf, crawling about on many legs.
He was just as greedy as he was ugly, and he ate leaf after leaf of the
butternut tree, and grew so fat that he burst his skin. Then a new skin
grew, and he kept on eating and bursting until he was quite big. But he
had also become wise and gentle; he had learned many things, and was not
quite so greedy now.

[Illustration: The Green Fairy With the Long Train (about 4/5 life
size)]

Mother Carey, the All-Mother, had been watching him, and knew that now
he was ready for the next step up. She told him to make himself a
hammock of rags and leaves, in the butternut tree. When he had crawled
into it, she touched him with her wand, the very same as the one she
used when she sent the Sleeping Beauty into her long sleep. Then that
little dwarf went soundly to sleep, hanging in his hammock.

Summer passed; autumn came; the leaves fell from the butternut tree,
taking the bundle-baby with them, exactly as in the old rhyme:

Rock-a-bye baby on the tree-top,
When the wind blows, your cradle will rock,
When the cold weather makes all the leaves fall,
Down tumbles baby and cradle and all.

But the hammock, with its sleeper, landed in a deep bed of leaves, and
lay there all winter, quite safe and warm.

Then when the springtime sun came over the hill, Mother Carey came
a-riding on the Warm Wind, and waving her wand. She stopped and kissed
the sleeping bundle-baby, just as the Prince kissed the Sleeping Beauty,
and instantly the baby awoke. Then happened the strangest thing. Out of
that ragged old hammock there came the most wonderful and beauti