mense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this?
One may see that the fairies thrive ill here."

"You are always discontented, my lord," said Pipalee; "but then you are
somewhat too old to travel,--at least, unless you go in your nutshell
and four."

The lord treasurer did not like this remark, so he muttered a peevish
pshaw, and took a pinch of honeysuckle dust to console himself for being
forced to put up with so much frivolity.

At this moment, ere the moon was yet at her middest height, Nymphalin
joined her subjects.

"I have just returned," said she, with a melancholy expression on her
countenance, "from a scene that has almost renewed in me that
sympathy with human beings which of late years our race has well-nigh
relinquished.

"I hurried through the town without noticing much food for adventure.
I paused for a moment on a fat citizen's pillow, and bade him dream of
love. He woke in a fright, and ran down to see that his cheeses
were safe. I swept with a light wing over a politician's eyes, and
straightway he dreamed of theatres and music. I caught an undertaker in
his first nap, and I have left him whirled into a waltz. For what would
be sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber,
in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer,
and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was
on the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel of
Purity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holy
thoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,--of a
happy home, of the kisses of her young lover, of eternal faith, and
unwaning tenderness. Let her at least enjoy in dreams what Fate
has refused to Truth! And, passing from the room, I found her lover
stretched in his cloak beside the door; for he reads with a feverish and
desperate prophecy the doom that waits her; and so loves he the very
air she breathes, the very ground she treads, that when she has left
his sight he creeps, silently and unknown to her, to the nearest spot
hallowed by her presence, anxious that while yet she is on earth not an
hour, not a moment, should be wasted upon other thoughts than those that
belong to her; and feeling a security, a fearful joy, in lessening the
distance that _now_ only momentarily divides them. And that love seemed
to me not as the love of the common world, and I stayed my wings
and looked upon it a