my eyes wide for signs and tokens that I was
surrounded by a seething and whirling invisible population of beings,
like ourselves, but glorified: yet unlike ourselves in this, that what
seemed entirely right, because natural, to them would have been in
ourselves horrible. The ruthlessness, for instance, of Quidnunc as he
pursued and obtained his desire, had Quidnunc been a human creature,
would have been revolting; the shamelessness of the fairy wife of
Ventris had she been capable of shame, how shameful had that been! But
I knew that these creatures were not human; I knew that they were not
under our law; and so I explained everything to myself. But to myself
only. It is not enough to explain a circumstance by negatives. If
Quidnunc and Mrs. Ventris were not under our law, neither are the sun,
moon and stars, neither are the apes and peacocks. But all these are
under some law, since law is the essence of the Kosmos. Under what law
then were Mrs. Ventris and Quidnunc? I burned to know that. For many
years of my life that knowledge was my steady desire; but I had no
means at hand of satisfying it. Reading? Well, I did read in a
fashion. I read, for example, Grimm's _Teutonic Mythology_, a stout
and exceedingly dull work in three volumes of a most unsatisfying
kind. I read other books of the same sort, chiefly German, dealing in
etymology, which I readily allow is a science of great value within
its proper sphere. But to Grimm and his colleagues etymology seemed to
me to be the contents of the casket rather than the key; for Grimm and
his colleagues started with a prejudice, that Gods, fairies and the
rest have never existed and don't exist. To them the interest of the
inquiry is not what is the nature, what are the laws of such beings,
but what is the nature of the primitive people who imagined the
existence of such beings? I very soon found out that Grimm and his
colleagues had nothing to tell me.

Then there was another class of book; that which dealt in demonology
and witchcraft, exemplified by a famous work called _Satan's Invisible
World Discovered_. Writers of these things may or may not have
believed in witches and fairies (which they classed together); but in
any event they believed them to be wicked, the abomination of
uncleanness. That made them false witnesses. My judgment revolted
against such ridiculous assumptions. Here was a case, you see, where
writers treated their subject too seriously, having the pulpi