ere thinking of this the music changed
again. It was a soft murmur, like the sound of the sea that is kept
forever in a sea-shell. Then it grew loud and rough, with the rush of
winds and the crash of waves. The fairies were filled with fright, and
before they knew that they were afraid, the music was singing a song
of hope, and then, all at once, it grew as merry as if there had never
been a sad thought in the world.

For a moment the fairies listened to it and all their feet began to
stir restlessly on the floor. One of the fairy men caught the hand of
a fairy girl--a fairy girl with cheeks like the tiny petals in the
heart of a rose, with a white gown like a mist, and hair like fine
sunbeams falling on the mist; he threw his arm about her waist, and
they danced away down the hall. In an instant all the rest were
dancing, too, alone, in pairs, and in rings. Naggeneen looked on and
laughed till he could scarcely play. All this time his music had moved
him less than anybody else who heard it. He did not feel what he had
made the others feel, but he knew how to pour it all out of his
fiddle.

The King made a sign for him to stop. All the dancers were still in an
instant. The lights in the hall went out. The next minute, if you had
been outside the rath and had laid your ear down on the turf which
covered it, you would have heard nothing more than you might hear
under the turf at any other time or in any other place.

[Illustration: ]

IV

THE CLEVERNESS OF MORTALS

If you live in the city of New York, or if you have ever been in the
city of New York for any long time, you know how disheartening, how
terrible, and how altogether unreasonable the climate can be at times.
But you also know how heavenly it can be on an autumn day, when the
sky and the air and the water are all in a good humor. To see and to
feel the best of it, you must be down in the Narrows, or somewhere
near there. The fierce heat has gone out of the air, but there is a
gentle warmth left in it. All the shores near you are turning from
green to brown and yellow, with here and there a dash of red. The sun
makes every sail in the bay a gleaming spot of white. Far up the bay
you see just an end of the city, with the tall buildings standing so
close that it looks like one great castle, built all over a hill that
slopes steeply down to the water on both sides. The Bridge looks like
a spider's web, spun across to the other shore. Beyond it all th