not thinking anybody was by; and they were so busy, and so
intoxicated with the wild happiness of it, and with the bumpers of
dew sharpened up with honey which they had been drinking, that
they noticed nothing; so Dame Aubrey stood there astonished and
admiring, and saw the little fantastic atoms holding hands, as many
as three hundred of them, tearing around in a great ring half as big
as an ordinary bedroom, and leaning away back and spreading
their mouths with laughter and song, which she could hear quite
distinctly, and kicking their legs up as much as three inches from
the ground in perfect abandon and hilarity–oh, the very maddest
and witchingest dance the woman ever saw.
But in about a minute or two minutes the poor little ruined
creatures discovered her. They burst out in one heartbreaking
squeak of grief and terror and fled every which way, with their wee
hazel-nut fists in their eyes and crying; and so disappeared.
The heartless woman–no, the foolish woman; she was not
heartless, but only thoughtless–went straight home and told the
neighbors all about it, whilst we, the small friends of the fairies,
were asleep and not witting the calamity that was come upon us,
and all unconscious that we ought to be up and trying to stop these
fatal tongues. In the morning everybody knew, and the disaster was
complete, for where everybody knows a thing the priest knows it,
of course. We all flocked to PЉre Fronte, crying and begging–and
he had to cry, too, seeing our sorrow, for he had a most kind and
gentle nature; and he did not want to banish the fairies, and said
so; but said he had no choice, for it had been decreed that if they
ever revealed themselves to man again, they must go. This all
happened at the worst time possible, for Joan of Arc was ill of a
fever and out of her head, and what could we do who had not her
gifts of reasoning and persuasion? We flew in a swarm to her bed
and cried out, “Joan, wake! Wake, there is no moment to lose!
Come and plead for the fairies–come and save them; only you can
do it!”
But her mind was wandering, she did not know what we said nor
what we meant; so we went away knowing all was lost. Yes, all
was lost, forever lost; the faithful friends of the children for five
hundred years must go, and never come back any more.
It was a bitter day for us, that day that PЉre Fronte held the
function under the tree and banished the fairies. We could not
wear mourning that any could have noticed, it would not have
been allowed; so we had to be content with some poor small rag of
black tied upon our garments where it made no show; but in our
hearts we wore mourning, big and noble and occupying all the
room, for our hearts were ours; they could not get at them to
prevent that.
The great tree–l’Arbre F‚e do Bourlemont was its beautiful
name–was never afterward quite as much to us as it had been
before, but it was always dear; is dear to me yet when I got there
now, once a year in my old age, to sit under it and bring back the
lost playmates of my youth and group them about me and look
upon their faces through my tears and break my heart, oh, my God!
No, the place was not quite the same afterward. In one or two ways
it could not be; for, the fairies’ protection being gone, the spring
lost much of its freshness and coldness, and more than two-thirds
of its volume, and the banished serpents and stinging insects
returned, and multiplied, and became a torment and have remained
so to this day.
When that wise little child, Joan, got well, we realized how much
her illness had cost us; for we found that we had been right in
believing she could save the fairies. She burst into a great storm of
anger, for so little a creature, and went straight to PЉre Fronte, and