"Whether my dear wife ever believed my account I cannot be sure. She
has never reproached me for wicked thoughtlessness, that's certain.
Mr. Walsh, our respected pastor, who has been so kind as to read this
paper, told me more than once that he could hardly doubt it. The
Salisbury police made no comments upon it one way or another. My
colleagues at the Bank, out of respect for my grief and sincere
repentance, treated me with a forbearance for which I can never be too
grateful. I need not add that every word of this is absolutely true. I
made notes of the most remarkable characteristics of the being I
called Thumbeline _at the time of remarking them_, and those notes are
still in my possession."

* * * * *

Here, with the exception of a few general reflections which are of
little value, Mr. Beckwith's paper ends. It was read, I ought to say,
by the Rev. Richard Walsh at the meeting of the South Wilts Folk-lore
Society and Field Club held at Amesbury in June 1892, and is to be
found in the published transactions of that body (Vol. IV. New Series,
pp. 305 _seq._).

THE FAIRY WIFE

There is nothing surprising in that story, to my mind, but the
reprobation with which Beckwith visits himself. What could he have
done that he did not? How could he have refrained from doing what he
did? Yet there are curious things about it, and one of those is the
partiality of the manifestation. The fairy was visible to him, his
child and his dogs but to no one else. So, in my own experience, had
she been whom I saw in K---- Park, whom Harkness, my companion, did
not see. My explanation of it does not carry me over all the
difficulties. I say, or will repeat if I have said it before, that the
fairy kind are really the spirit, essence, substance (what you will)
of certain sensible things, such as trees, flowers, wind, water,
hills, woods, marshes and the like, that their normal appearance to us
is that of these natural phenomena; but that in certain states of
mind, perhaps in certain conditions of body, there is a relation
established by which we are able to see them on our own terms, as it
were, or in our own idiom, and they also to treat with us to some
extent, to a large extent, on the same plane or standing-ground. That
there are limitations to this relationship is plain already; for
instance, Beckwith was not able to get his fairy prisoner to speak,
and I myself have never had speech with more