_A Hoosier Fairy Tale._

You think that folks in fine clothes are the only folks that ever see
fairies, and that poor folks can't afford them. But in the days of the
real old-fashioned "Green Jacket and White Owl's Feather" fairies, it
was the poor boy carrying fagots to the cabin of his widowed mother who
saw wonders of all sorts wrought by the little people; and it was the
poor girl who had a fairy godmother. It must be confessed that the
mystery-working, dewdrop-dancing, wand-waving, pumpkin-metamorphosing
little rascals have been spoiled of late years by being admitted into
fine houses. Having their pictures painted by artists, their praises sung
by poets, their adventures told in gilt-edge books, and, above all,
getting into the delicious leaves of St. Nicholas, has made them "stuck
up," so that it is not the poor girl in the cinders, nor the boy with a
bundle of fagots now, but girls who wear button boots and tie-back
skirts, and boys with fancy waists and striped stockings that are
befriended by fairies, whom they do not need.

But away off from the cities there still lives a race of unflattered
fairies who are not snobbish, and who love little girls and boys in
pinafores and ragged jackets. These spirits are not very handsome, and
so the artists do not draw their pictures, and they do not get into
gilt-edge Christmas books. Dear, ugly, good fairies! I hope they will not
be spoiled by my telling you something about them.

Little Bobby Towpate saw some of them; and it's about Bobby, and the
fairies he saw, that I want to speak. Bobby was the thirteenth child in
a rather large family--there were three younger than he. He lived in a
log cabin on the banks of a stream, the right name of which is "Indian
Kentucky Creek." I suppose it was named "Indian Kentucky" because it is
not in Kentucky, but in Indiana; and as for Indians, they have been gone
many a day. The people always call it "The Injun Kaintuck." They tuck up
the name to make it shorter.

Bobby was only four years and three-quarters old, but he had been in
pantaloons for three years and a half, for the people in the Indian
Kaintuck put their little boys into breeches as soon as they can
walk--perhaps a little before. And such breeches! The little white-headed
fellows look like dwarf grandfathers, thirteen hundred years of age. They
go toddling about like old men who have grown little again, and forgotten
everything they ever knew.

But Bobby Towp