in the shade, and the white people came out of the water and out
of the wood, and played, and danced, and sang, and I began to fancy that
nurse told me about something like it before I saw them, only I couldn't
recollect exactly what she told me. Then I wondered whether she had been
the white lady, as I remembered she was just as white and beautiful, and
had the same dark eyes and black hair; and sometimes she smiled and
looked like the lady had looked, when she was telling me some of her
stories, beginning with 'Once on a time,' or 'In the time of the
fairies.' But I thought she couldn't be the lady, as she seemed to have
gone a different way into the wood, and I didn't think the man who came
after us could be the other, or I couldn't have seen that wonderful
secret in the secret wood. I thought of the moon: but it was afterwards
when I was in the middle of the wild land, where the earth was made into
the shape of great figures, and it was all walls, and mysterious
hollows, and smooth round mounds, that I saw the great white moon come
up over a round hill. I was wondering about all these things, till at
last I got quite frightened, because I was afraid something had happened
to me, and I remembered nurse's tale of the poor girl who went into the
hollow pit, and was carried away at last by the black man. I knew I had
gone into a hollow pit too, and perhaps it was the same, and I had done
something dreadful. So I did the charm over again, and touched my eyes
and my lips and my hair in a peculiar manner, and said the old words
from the fairy language, so that I might be sure I had not been carried
away. I tried again to see the secret wood, and to creep up the passage
and see what I had seen there, but somehow I couldn't, and I kept on
thinking of nurse's stories. There was one I remembered about a young
man who once upon a time went hunting, and all the day he and his hounds
hunted everywhere, and they crossed the rivers and went into all the
woods, and went round the marshes, but they couldn't find anything at
all, and they hunted all day till the sun sank down and began to set
behind the mountain. And the young man was angry because he couldn't
find anything, and he was going to turn back, when just as the sun
touched the mountain, he saw come out of a brake in front of him a
beautiful white stag. And he cheered to his hounds, but they whined and
would not follow, and he cheered to his horse, but it shivered and stood
s