good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you
can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of
children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very
likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing
looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that
she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks.
They usually pretend to be flowers, because the court sits in the
Fairies' Basin, and there are so many flowers there, and all along the
Baby Walk, that a flower is the thing least likely to attract
attention. They dress exactly like flowers, and change with the
seasons, putting on white when lilies are in and blue for bluebells,
and so on. They like crocus and hyacinth time best of all, as they are
partial to a bit of colour, but tulips (except white ones, which are
the fairy cradles) they consider garish, and they sometimes put off
dressing like tulips for days, so that the beginning of the tulip weeks
is almost the best time to catch them.

When they think you are not looking they skip along pretty lively, but
if you look, and they fear there is no time to hide, they stand quite
still pretending to be flowers. Then, after you have passed without
knowing that they were fairies, they rush home and tell their mothers
they have had such an adventure. The Fairy Basin, you remember, is all
covered with ground-ivy (from which they make their castor oil), with
flowers growing in it here and there. Most of them really are flowers,
but some of them are fairies. You never can be sure of them, but a
good plan is to walk by looking the other way, and then turn round
sharply. Another good plan, which David and I sometimes follow, is to
stare them down. After a long time they can't help winking, and then
you know for certain that they are fairies.

There are also numbers of them along the Baby Walk, which is a famous
gentle place, as spots frequented by fairies are called. Once
twenty-four of them had an extraordinary adventure. They were a girls'
school out for a walk with the governess, and all wearing hyacinth
gowns, when she suddenly put her finger to her mouth, and then they all
stood still on an empty bed and pretended to be hyacinths.
Unfortunately what the governess had heard was two gardeners coming to
plant new flowers in that very bed. They were wheeling a hand-cart
with the flowers in it, and were quit