reatures of the books. Once, when a mere boy, I caught one of the
little imps at work, and watched her for several minutes without
dreaming that I had been looking at a real fairy all this time. What did
I see? I was sitting in a clearing, partly in the shade of a sapling
growth of oak which sprang from the trunk of a felled tree. While thus
half reclining I noticed a diminutive black wasplike insect upon one of
the oak leaves close to my face.

The insect seemed almost stationary and not inclined to resent my
intrusion, so I observed her closely. I soon discovered that she was
inserting her sting into the midstem of the leaf, or, perhaps,
withdrawing it therefrom, for in a few moments the midge flew away. I
remember wondering what the insect was trying to do, and not until years
later did I realize that I had been witnessing the secret arts of the
magician of the insect world--a very Puck or Ariel, as I have said--a
fairy with a magic wand which any sprite in elfindom might covet.

The wand of Hermann never wrought such a wonder as did this magic touch
of the little black fly upon the oak leaf. Had I chanced to visit the
spot a few weeks later, what a beautiful red-cheeked apple could I have
plucked from that hemstitched leaf!

This was but one of a veritable swarm of mischief-making midges
everywhere flitting among the trees; and while they are quite as various
in their shapes as the traditional forms of fairies--the ouphes and
imps, the gnomes and elves of quaintest mien, as well as the dainty fays
and sylphs and sprites--there is one feature common to them all which
annihilates the ideal of all the pictorial authorities on fairydom.
Neither Grimm, nor Laboulaye, nor any of the masters of fairy lore seems
to have discovered that a fairy has no right to those butterfly wings
which the pages of books show us. Those of the real fairy are quite
different, being narrow and glassy, and bear the magician's peculiar
sign in their crisscross veins.

What a world of mischief is going on here in the fields! Here is one of
the witching sprites among the drooping blossoms of the oak. "You would
fain be an acorn," she says, as she pierces the tender blossoms with her
wand, "but I charge thee bring forth a string of currants"; and
immediately the blossoms begin to obey the behest, and erelong a mimic
string of currants droops upon the stem. Upon another tender branch near
by a jet-black gauze-winged elf is casting a similar spel