what you seem to
think."

"Never mind what I seem to think. You shall find the way into Fairy Land
to-morrow. Now look in my eyes."

Eagerly I did so. They filled me with an unknown longing. I remembered
somehow that my mother died when I was a baby. I looked deeper and
deeper, till they spread around me like seas, and I sank in their
waters. I forgot all the rest, till I found myself at the window, whose
gloomy curtains were withdrawn, and where I stood gazing on a whole
heaven of stars, small and sparkling in the moonlight. Below lay a sea,
still as death and hoary in the moon, sweeping into bays and around
capes and islands, away, away, I knew not whither. Alas! it was no
sea, but a low bog burnished by the moon. "Surely there is such a sea
somewhere!" said I to myself. A low sweet voice beside me replied--

"In Fairy Land, Anodos."

I turned, but saw no one. I closed the secretary, and went to my own
room, and to bed.

All this I recalled as I lay with half-closed eyes. I was soon to find
the truth of the lady's promise, that this day I should discover the
road into Fairy Land.

CHAPTER II

"'Where is the stream?' cried he, with tears. 'Seest thou
its not in blue waves above us?' He looked up, and lo! the
blue stream was flowing gently over their heads."
--NOVALIS, Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

While these strange events were passing through my mind, I suddenly, as
one awakes to the consciousness that the sea has been moaning by him for
hours, or that the storm has been howling about his window all night,
became aware of the sound of running water near me; and, looking out of
bed, I saw that a large green marble basin, in which I was wont to wash,
and which stood on a low pedestal of the same material in a corner of
my room, was overflowing like a spring; and that a stream of clear water
was running over the carpet, all the length of the room, finding its
outlet I knew not where. And, stranger still, where this carpet, which
I had myself designed to imitate a field of grass and daisies, bordered
the course of the little stream, the grass-blades and daisies seemed to
wave in a tiny breeze that followed the water's flow; while under the
rivulet they bent and swayed with every motion of the changeful current,
as if they were about to dissolve with it, and, forsaking their fixed
form, become fluent as the waters.

My dressing-table was an old-fashioned piece of furniture of black
oa