ching up to touch her curls.

I never had seen her that I did not want to. They were like I thought
they would be. Father and Laddie and some of us had wavy hair, but
hers was crisp--and it clung to your fingers, and wrapped around them
and seemed to tug at your heart like it does when a baby grips you. I
drew away my hand, and the hair stretched out until it was long as any
of ours, and then curled up again, and you could see that no tins had
stabbed into her head to make those curls. I began trying to single
out one hair.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I want to know if only one hair is strong enough to draw a drowning
man from the water or strangle an unhappy one," I said.

"Believe me, no!" cried the Princess. "It would take all I have, woven
into a rope, to do that."

"Laddie knows curls that just one hair of them is strong enough," I
boasted.

"I wonder now!" said the Princess. "I think he must have been making
poetry or telling Fairy tales."

"He was telling the truth," I assured her. "Father doesn't believe in
Fairies, and mother laughs, but Laddie and I know. Do you believe in
Fairies?"

"Of course I do!" she said.

"Then you know that this COULD be an Enchanted Wood?"

"I have found it so," said the Princess.

"And MAYBE this is a Magic Carpet?"

"It surely is a Magic Carpet."

"And you might be the daughter of the Queen? Your eyes are 'moonlit
pools of darkness.' If only your hair were stronger, and you knew
about making sunshine!"

"Maybe it is stronger than I think. It never has been tested. Perhaps
I do know about making sunshine. Possibly I am as true as the wood and
the carpet."

I drew away and stared at her. The longer I looked the more uncertain
I became. Maybe her mother was the Queen. Perhaps that was the
mystery. It might be the reason she didn't want the people to see her.
Maybe she was so busy making sunshine for the Princess to bring to
Laddie that she had no time to sew carpet rags, and to go to quiltings,
and funerals, and make visits. It was hard to know what to think.

"I wish you'd tell me plain out if you are the Queen's daughter," I
said. "It's most important. You can't have this letter unless I KNOW.
It's the very first time Laddie ever trusted me with a letter, and I
just can't give it to the wrong person."

"Then why don't you leave it where he told you?"

"But you have gone and found the place. You started to take it once;
you would a