nd stop its bellowing, but it would
not stop. And he tried to smooth his forehead, and it stayed wrinkled,
and he tried to draw up the corners of his mouth, and they would not
stay, and he tried to open his eyes, and they would not open. And
there was a strange feeling in his throat, and his heart beat very
fast, and though he had not dipped up the water of the Standing Pool
for as much as two hours, his cheeks were all wet.

"Oh," said Gillibloom to himself, "what has happened to me! what has
happened to me!"

And he started running as fast as he could through the silent forest
to the Earth-Woman's house, and as he ran he said to himself: "What
has happened to me? What has happened to me? Am I afraid?"

Now for a fairy to be afraid is just as impossible as for it not to be
a fairy, but Gillibloom knew he was somehow changed, and he could only
run and call aloud at the top of his voice, "Am I afraid? Am I
afraid?"

Now the Earth-Woman lives in the very middle of the wood, in a green
house that nobody can see by day, and a dark brown house that nobody
can see by night. And when she heard Gillibloom come screaming through
the forest, she stepped to her door and stood waiting for him, and in
a minute he was there, and laid hold of her skirts and clung to them.

"Well! Well!" said the Earth-Woman, "and who is this?" Then she
stooped down and took up Gillibloom between her thumb and forefinger,
and looked at him. "By acorns and nuts!" said she. "It's the Cry
Fairy."

"No! no!" said Gillibloom. "No! no! I'm the Almost Cry Fairy. I'm
never going to Quite Cry, for I don't know what it would do to me."

The Earth-Woman laid her finger to Gillibloom's cheek and touched it
and put it, all wet, to her lips. She nodded and then shook her head.

"Well," said she, "you were a silly, weren't you? Now what do you want
me to do?"

Gillibloom kept on bellowing.

"I want to be with the others."

"What others?" asked the Earth-Woman severely. "The other cry-babies?"

"The fairies and the furs and the feathers and the wings and the fins
and the tails and the sun and the moon," bellowed Gillibloom, though
now you could hardly have understood a word he said.

But the Earth-Woman could understand. She understood everything.

"Then," she said, "you must open your eyes, smooth out your forehead
and pull up your mouth, and stop that noise."

Gillibloom tried, because, whatever the Earth-Woman says in the
forest, it has to be don