sted for their nests, but a policeman has been appointed to hold on
at the other end.

[Illustration: The fairies are exquisite dancers]

One of the great differences between the fairies and us is that they
never do anything useful. When the first baby laughed for the first
time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping
about. That was the beginning of fairies. They look tremendously
busy, you know, as if they had not a moment to spare, but if you were
to ask them what they are doing, they could not tell you in the least.
They are frightfully ignorant, and everything they do is make-believe.
They have a postman, but he never calls except at Christmas with his
little box, and though they have beautiful schools, nothing is taught
in them; the youngest child being chief person is always elected
mistress, and when she has called the roll, they all go out for a walk
and never come back. It is a very noticeable thing that, in fairy
families, the youngest is always chief person, and usually becomes a
prince or princess; and children remember this, and think it must be so
among humans also, and that is why they are often made uneasy when they
come upon their mother furtively putting new frills on the basinette.

You have probably observed that your baby-sister wants to do all sorts
of things that your mother and her nurse want her not to do--to stand
up at sitting-down time, and to sit down at stand-up time, for
instance, or to wake up when she should fall asleep, or to crawl on the
floor when she is wearing her best frock, and so on, and perhaps you
put this down to naughtiness. But it is not; it simply means that she
is doing as she has seen the fairies do; she begins by following their
ways, and it takes about two years to get her into the human ways. Her
fits of passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually called
teething, are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation, because
we don't understand her, though she is talking an intelligible
language. She is talking fairy. The reason mothers and nurses know
what her remarks mean, before other people know, as that 'Guch' means
'Give it to me at once,' while 'Wa' is 'Why do you wear such a funny
hat?' is because, mixing so much with babies, they have picked up a
little of the fairy language.

[Illustration: A fairy ring]

Of late David has been thinking back hard about the fairy tongue, with
his hands clutching his temples, and