towards the purple mountains.
Now they were not always sure which were her shadows: and presently a
crescent moon came, and still further confused them; also the sand
began to have tufts of grass in it; and then, when they had gone a
little farther, there were beautiful patches of anemones, and
hyacinths, and jonquils, and crown imperials, and they stopped to
gather them; and they got among some trees, and then, as they had
nothing to guide them but the shadows, and these went all sorts of
ways, they lost a great deal of time, and the trees became of taller
growth; but they still ran on and on till they got into a thick forest
where it was quite dark, and here Mopsa began to cry, for she was
tired.

"If I could only begin to be a queen," she said to Jack, "I could go
wherever I pleased. I am not a fairy, and yet I am not a proper queen.
Oh, what shall I do? I cannot go any farther."

So Jack gave her some of the seeds of the melon, though it was so dark
that he could scarcely find the way to her mouth, and then he took
some himself, and they both felt that they were rested, and Jack
comforted Mopsa.

"If you are not a queen yet," he said, "you will be by to-morrow
morning; for when our shadows danced on before us yours was so very
nearly the same height as mine, that I could hardly see any
difference."

When they reached the end of that great forest, and found themselves
out in all sorts of moonlight, the first thing they did was to
laugh,--the shadows looked so odd, sticking out in every direction;
and the next thing they did was to stand back to back, and put their
heels together, and touch their heads together, to see by the shadow
which was the taller; and Jack was still the least bit in the world
taller than Mopsa; so they knew she was not a queen yet, and they ate
some more melon-seeds, and began to climb up the mountain.

They climbed till the trees of the forest looked no bigger than
gooseberry bushes, and then they climbed till the whole forest looked
only like a patch of moss; and then, when they got a little higher,
they saw the wonderful river, a long way off, and the snow glittering
on the peaks overhead; and while they were looking and wondering how
they should find a pass, the moons all went down, one after the
other, and, if Mopsa had not found some glowworms, they would have
been quite in the dark again. However, she took a dozen of them, and
put them round Jack's ankles, so that when he walked h