he fumbled
with the door. "And no doubt meant well. But as for that
cock-and-bull story--"

I pieced it together from the utterly divergent versions furnished me
by the Professor and the Doctor, assisted, so far as later incidents
are concerned, by knowledge common to the village.

I. THE STORY.

It commenced, so I calculate, about the year 2000 B.C., or, to be more
precise--for figures are not the strong point of the old
chroniclers--when King Heremon ruled over Ireland and Harbundia was
Queen of the White Ladies of Brittany, the fairy Malvina being her
favourite attendant. It is with Malvina that this story is chiefly
concerned. Various quite pleasant happenings are recorded to her
credit. The White Ladies belonged to the "good people," and, on the
whole, lived up to their reputation. But in Malvina, side by side with
much that is commendable, there appears to have existed a most
reprehensible spirit of mischief, displaying itself in pranks that,
excusable, or at all events understandable, in, say, a pixy or a
pigwidgeon, strike one as altogether unworthy of a well-principled
White Lady, posing as the friend and benefactress of mankind. For
merely refusing to dance with her--at midnight, by the shores of a
mountain lake; neither the time nor the place calculated to appeal to
an elderly gentleman, suffering possibly from rheumatism--she on one
occasion transformed an eminently respectable proprietor of tin mines
into a nightingale, necessitating a change of habits that to a business
man must have been singularly irritating. On another occasion a quite
important queen, having had the misfortune to quarrel with Malvina over
some absurd point of etiquette in connection with a lizard, seems, on
waking the next morning, to have found herself changed into what one
judges, from the somewhat vague description afforded by the ancient
chroniclers, to have been a sort of vegetable marrow.

Such changes, according to the Professor, who is prepared to maintain
that evidence of an historical nature exists sufficient to prove that
the White Ladies formed at one time an actual living community, must be
taken in an allegorical sense. Just as modern lunatics believe
themselves to be china vases or poll-parrots, and think and behave as
such, so it must have been easy, the Professor argues, for beings of
superior intelligence to have exerted hypnotic influence upon the
superstitious savages by whom they were surround