k: "O Gillibloom, what have you learned?"

Gillibloom looked at them a few minutes very solemnly, as if he wanted
them to pay great attention to what he was going to say. Then he
answered: "I have not really learned anything, but I have almost
learned to cry."

"To cry, Gillibloom?" called the fairies. "What is that?"

"I know," cried a fairy who was a great traveller, and had once gone
on a moonbeam excursion to a large town. "It's what mortals do when
they want something they haven't got, or have something they don't
want."

"Yes," said Gillibloom, "that is it."

"But what good is it?" asked the other fairies.

"I don't really know," said Gillibloom: "but I think it is really very
good indeed, because so many of them do it. Sometimes if you are very
little and want something, and cry and cry, somebody brings it to
you."

"But we don't want anything we can't get without crying," said the
fairies.

"Yes, that is true," said Gillibloom. "But it can't be that so many
people would cry if there wasn't some use in it. Try as I may, I can't
find out what the use is, but I thought I might form a class and we
could all cry together, and then we should see what happened."

Now some of the fairies were too busy painting flowers to join a
class, and more were too busy riding on bees' wings, but there were a
few dozen who said:

"We might as well join. Why not? It will please Gillibloom, and maybe
there is some use in it, after all."

So Gillibloom appointed the next night by the banks of the Standing
Pool, for, he said, it would be quite impossible at first to cry
anywhere except by the side of still water.

The next night they were all there, twenty-seven of them, each with a
moss-cup in his hand.

So the fairies all sat down in a circle, and looked pleasantly about
at one another and said: "We are here to cry."

"Now, in the beginning," said Gillibloom, "I will show you how it is
done. The first three of you there by the acorn must run at me and
knock off my cap."

So the first three ran gaily at him and knocked off his cap, but they
might as well not have done it, for another cap, just as green and
with just as red a feather, blew right down from somewhere else and
settled on his head, and the fairies laughed, and Gillibloom did, too.

"Well," said he, "the next three of you must trip me up, and I'll fall
down on the ground, and then I'll show you how to cry."

So the next three tripped him up, and Gillib