m, and clothed her and braided her hair,
and brought her down again, and gave her the first food that she had
ever eaten. Then the farmer's wife asked many questions.

'Where have you come from?' she said.

'Over the marshes.'

'From what direction?' said the farmer's wife.

'South,' said the little Wild Thing with the new soul.

'But none can come over the marshes from the south,' said the
farmer's wife.

'No, they can't do that,' said the farmer.

'I lived in the marshes.'

'Who are you?' asked the farmer's wife.

'I am a Wild Thing, and have found a soul in the marshes, and we are
kin to the Elf-folk.'

Talking it over afterwards, the farmer and his wife agreed that she
must be a gipsy who had been lost, and that she was queer with
hunger and exposure.

So that night the little Wild Thing slept in the farmer's house, but
her new soul stayed awake the whole night long dreaming of the
beauty of the marshes.

As soon as dawn came over the waste and shone on the farmer's house,
she looked from the window towards the glittering waters, and saw
the inner beauty of the marsh. For the Wild Things only love the
marsh and know its haunts, but now she perceived the mystery of its
distances and the glamour of its perilous pools, with their fair and
deadly mosses, and felt the marvel of the North Wind who comes
dominant out of unknown icy lands, and the wonder of that ebb and
flow of life when the wildfowl whirl in at evening to the marshlands
and at dawn pass out to sea. And she knew that over her head above
the farmer's house stretched wide Paradise, where perhaps God was
now imagining a sunrise while angels played low on lutes, and the
sun came rising up on the world below to gladden fields and marsh.

And all that heaven thought, the marsh thought too; for the blue of
the marsh was as the blue of heaven, and the great cloud shapes in
heaven became the shapes in the marsh, and through each ran
momentary rivers of purple, errant between banks of gold. And the
stalwart army of reeds appeared out of the gloom with all their
pennons waving as far as the eye could see. And from another window
she saw the vast cathedral gathering its ponderous strength
together, and lifting it up in towers out of the marshlands.

She said, 'I will never, never leave the marsh.'

An hour later she dressed with great difficulty and went down to eat
the second meal of her life. The farmer and his wife were kindly
folk, and ta