body who passed always called out in the friendliest way,
"Hello, Peter!" or "Hello, Bridget!" or "The luck rise with ye!" which
is the most common of all greetings in Tir-na-n'Og.

"Gee!" was Peter's habitual comment after the telling, "maybe it wasn't
swell havin' 'em know us--names an' all. Betcher life we wasn't cases
to them--no, siree!"

It was Susan who remembered best how everything looked--Susan, who had
never been to the country in all her starved little life--that is, if
one excepts the times Margaret MacLean had taken her on the Ward C
"special." She told so well how all the trees and flowers were
fashioned that it was an easy matter putting names to them.

In the center of Tir-na-n'Og towered a great hill; but instead of its
being capped with peak or rocks it was gently hollowed at the top, as
though in the beginning, when it was thrown up molten from the depths
of somewhere, a giant thumb had pressed it down and smoothed it round
and even. All about the brim of it grew hawthorns and rowans and
hazel-trees. In the grass, everywhere, were thousands and millions of
primroses, heart's-ease, and morning-glories; all crowded together, so
Susan said, like the patterns on the Persian carpet in the board-room.
It was all so beautiful and faeryish and heart-desired that "yer'd have
said it wasn't real if yer hadn't ha' knowed it was."

The children stood on the brink of the giant hollow and clapped their
hands for the very joy of seeing it all; and there--a little man
stepped up to them and doffed his cap. The queen wanted them--she was
waiting for them by the throne that very minute; and the little man was
to bring them to her.

Now that throne--according to Susan--was nothing like the thrones one
finds in stories or Journeys through palaces to see. It was not cold,
hard, or forbidding; instead, it was as soft and green and pillowy as
an inflated golf-bunker might be, and just high and comfortable enough
for the baby faeries to discover it and go to sleep there whenever they
felt tired. The throne was full of them when the children looked, and
some one was tumbling them off like so many kittens.

"That is the queen," said the little man, pointing.

The children stood on tiptoes and craned their necks the better to see;
but it was not until they had come quite close that they saw that her
dress was gray, and her hair was gray, and she was small, and her face
was like--

"Bless me if it ain't!" shoute