lves up to the ceilings at Sunnybook Farm and dangled there,
making fun for everybody. They never withered, even at the brick house
in Riverboro, where the air was particularly inimical to fairies,
for Miss Miranda Sawyer would have scared any ordinary elf out of her
seventeen senses. They followed Rebecca to Wareham, and during Abijah
Flagg's Latin correspondence with Emma Jane they fluttered about that
young person's head in such a manner that Rebecca was almost afraid that
she would discover them herself, although this is something, as a matter
of fact, that never does happen.

A week had gone by since the Latin missive had been taken from
the post-office by Emma Jane, and now, by means of much midnight
oil-burning, by much cautious questioning of Miss Maxwell, by such
scrutiny of the moods and tenses of Latin verbs as wellnigh destroyed
her brain tissue, she had mastered its romantic message. If it was
conventional in style, Emma Jane never suspected it. If some of the
similes seemed to have been culled from the Latin poets, and some of the
phrases built up from Latin exercises, Emma Jane was neither scholar
nor critic; the similes, the phrases, the sentiments, when finally
translated and written down in black-and-white English, made, in her
opinion, the most convincing and heart-melting document ever sent
through the mails:

Mea cara Emma:

Cur audeo scribere ad te epistulam? Es mihi dea! Semper es in mea anima.
Iterum et iterum es cum me in somnis. Saepe video tuas capillos auri,
tuos pulchros oculos similes caelo, tuas genas, quasi rubentes rosas
in nive. Tua vox est dulcior quam cantus avium aut murmur rivuli in
montibus.

Cur sum ego tam miser et pauper et indignus, et tu tam dulcis et bona et
nobilis?

Si cogitabis de me ero beatus. Tu es sola puella quam amo, et semper
eris. Alias puellas non amavi. Forte olim amabis me, sed sum indignus.
Sine te sum miser, cum tu es prope mea vita omni est goddamn.

Vale, carissima, carissima puella!

De tuo fideli servo A.F.

My dear Emma:

Why dare I write to you a letter? You are to me a goddess! Always you
are in my heart. Again and again you are with me in dreams. Often I see
your locks of gold, your beautiful eyes like the sky, your cheeks, as
red roses in snow. Your voice is sweeter than the singing of birds or
the murmur of the stream in the mountains.

Why am I so wretched and poor and unworthy, and you so sweet and good
and noble?

If you will think