mber this, and think it must be so among humans also, and
that is why they are often made uneasy when they come upon their mother
furtively putting new frills on the basinette.

You have probably observed that your baby-sister wants to do all sorts
of things that your mother and her nurse want her not to do: to stand up
at sitting-down time, and to sit down at standing-up time, for instance,
or to wake up when she should fall asleep, or to crawl on the floor when
she is wearing her best frock, and so on, and perhaps you put this down
to naughtiness. But it is not; it simply means that she is doing as
she has seen the fairies do; she begins by following their ways, and
it takes about two years to get her into the human ways. Her fits of
passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually called teething,
are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation, because we don't
understand her, though she is talking an intelligible language. She is
talking fairy. The reason mothers and nurses know what her remarks mean,
before other people know, as that "Guch" means "Give it to me at once,"
while "Wa" is "Why do you wear such a funny hat?" is because, mixing so
much with babies, they have picked up a little of the fairy language.

Of late David has been thinking back hard about the fairy tongue, with
his hands clutching his temples, and he has remembered a number of their
phrases which I shall tell you some day if I don't forget. He had heard
them in the days when he was a thrush, and though I suggested to him
that perhaps it is really bird language he is remembering, he says not,
for these phrases are about fun and adventures, and the birds talked of
nothing but nest-building. He distinctly remembers that the birds used
to go from spot to spot like ladies at shop-windows, looking at the
different nests and saying, "Not my colour, my dear," and "How would
that do with a soft lining?" and "But will it wear?" and "What hideous
trimming!" and so on.

The fairies are exquisite dancers, and that is why one of the first
things the baby does is to sign to you to dance to him and then to cry
when you do it. They hold their great balls in the open air, in what
is called a fairy-ring. For weeks afterward you can see the ring on the
grass. It is not there when they begin, but they make it by waltzing
round and round. Sometimes you will find mushrooms inside the ring, and
these are fairy chairs that the servants have forgotten to clear