The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unruly Sprite, by Henry van Dyke

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Title: The Unruly Sprite
The Unknown Quantity, A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales

Author: Henry van Dyke

Release Date: January 2, 2007 [EBook #20255]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNRULY SPRITE ***

Produced by Rich Kuslan

THE UNRULY SPRITE

By Henry van Dyke

A Partial Fairy Tale

There was once a man who was also a writer of books.

The merit of his books lies beyond the horizon of this tale. No doubt
some of them were good, and some of them were bad, and some were merely
popular. But he was all the time trying to make them better, for he
was quite an honest man, and thankful that the world should give him a
living for his writing. Moreover, he found great delight in the doing of
it, which was something that did not enter into the world's account--a
kind of daily Christmas present in addition to his wages.

But the interesting thing about the man was that he had a clan or train
of little sprites attending him--small, delicate, aerial creatures,
who came and went around him at their pleasure, and showed him wonderful
things, and sang to him, and kept him from being discouraged, and often
helped him with his work.

If you ask me what they were and where they came from, I must frankly
tell you that I do not know. Neither did the man know. Neither does
anybody else know.

But he had sense enough to understand that they were real--just as
real as any of the other mysterious things, like microbes, and polonium,
and chemical affinities, and the northern lights, by which we are
surrounded. Sometimes it seemed as if the sprites were the children of
the flowers that die in blooming; and sometimes as if they came in a
flock with the birds from the south; and sometimes as if they rose one
by one from the roots of the trees in the deep forest, or from the
waves of the sea when the moon lay upon them; and sometimes as if they
appeared suddenly in the streets of the city after the people had passed
by and the houses had gone to sleep. They were as light as thistle-down,
as unsubstantial as mists up