ghtens me
sometimes."

"Why should it frighten you?"

She gave me no answer.

"How old are you?" I resumed.

"I do not know what you mean. We are all just that."

"How big will the baby grow?"

"I cannot tell.--Some," she added, with a trouble in her voice, "begin
to grow after we think they have stopped.--That is a frightful thing. We
don't talk about it!"

"What makes it frightful?"

She was silent for a moment, then answered,

"We fear they may be beginning to grow giants."

"Why should you fear that?"

"Because it is so terrible.--I don't want to talk about it!"

She pressed the baby to her bosom with such an anxious look that I dared
not further question her.

Before long I began to perceive in two or three of the smaller children
some traces of greed and selfishness, and noted that the bigger girls
cast on these a not infrequent glance of anxiety.

None of them put a hand to my work: they would do nothing for the
giants! But they never relaxed their loving ministrations to me. They
would sing to me, one after another, for hours; climb the tree to reach
my mouth and pop fruit into it with their dainty little fingers; and
they kept constant watch against the approach of a giant.

Sometimes they would sit and tell me stories--mostly very childish, and
often seeming to mean hardly anything. Now and then they would call a
general assembly to amuse me. On one such occasion a moody little
fellow sang me a strange crooning song, with a refrain so pathetic that,
although unintelligible to me, it caused the tears to run down my face.
This phenomenon made those who saw it regard me with much perplexity.
Then first I bethought myself that I had not once, in that world, looked
on water, falling or lying or running. Plenty there had been in some
long vanished age--that was plain enough--but the Little Ones had never
seen any before they saw my tears! They had, nevertheless, it seemed,
some dim, instinctive perception of their origin; for a very small child
went up to the singer, shook his clenched pud in his face, and said
something like this: "'Ou skeeze ze juice out of ze good giant's
seeberries! Bad giant!"

"How is it," I said one day to Lona, as she sat with the baby in her
arms at the foot of my tree, "that I never see any children among the
giants?"

She stared a little, as if looking in vain for some sense in the
question, then replied,

"They are giants; there are no little ones."

"Have they