on, and usually becomes a
prince or princess; and children remember this, and think it must be so
among humans also; and that is why they are often made uneasy when they
come upon their mother furtively putting new frills on the basinette.

You have probably observed that your baby-sister wants to do all sorts
of things that your mother and her nurse want her not to do--to stand
up at sitting-down time, and to sit down at stand-up time, for
instance, or to wake up when she should fall asleep, or to crawl on the
floor when she is wearing her best frock, and so on, and perhaps you
put this down to naughtiness. But it is not; it simply means that she
is doing as she has seen the fairies do; she begins by following their
ways, and it takes about two years to get her into the human ways. Her
fits of passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually called
teething, are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation, because
we don't understand her, though she is talking an intelligible
language. She is talking fairy. The reason mothers and nurses know
what her remarks mean, before other people know, as that 'Guch' means
'Give it to me at once,' while 'Wa' is 'Why do you wear such a funny
hat?' is because, mixing so much with babies, they have picked up a
little of the fairy language.

Of late David has been thinking back hard about the fairy tongue, with
his hands clutching his temples, and he has remembered a number of
their phrases which I shall tell you some day if I don't forget. He
had heard them in the days when he was a thrush, and though I suggested
to him that perhaps it is really bird language he is remembering, he
says not, for these phrases are about fun and adventures, and the birds
talked of nothing but nest-building. He distinctly remembers that the
birds used to go from spot to spot like ladies at shop windows, looking
at the different nests and saying, 'Not my colour, my dear,' and 'How
would that do with a soft lining?' and 'But will it wear?' and 'What
hideous trimming!' and so on.

The fairies are exquisite dancers, and that is why one of the first
things the baby does is to sign to you to dance to him and then to cry
when you do it. They hold their great balls in the open air, in what
is called a fairy ring. For weeks afterwards you can see the ring on
the grass. It is not there when they begin, but they make it by
waltzing round and round. Sometimes you will find mushrooms inside the
ri