Page:Stories and story-telling (1915).djvu/183

 dance in her honor. They circled nine times and then looked up at her, and she beamed down on them and they bowed low. Then she passed on through the heavens to make way for the day.

It was now the dawn of morning. The pixies ran back to the tulip cradles in the little old woman's garden, crying,

"Weeny Sleepy head, Leave Dewy bed,  Time To get up  From Soft tulip  Cup."

The little old woman awoke in the nick of time to hear them kissing and caressing the elfin babies as they carried them home. In a bound she was out of bed and at the window, but they had vanished.

For all that she knew they had been there. She could tell it by the tulips. The slim green stalks of them stood in the earth, as they had when she planted them, tall and straight. And every other row of lovely cups they held was red and every other was yellow. Yet there was a wonderful change. It wasn't only the shining drops of dew on them. No, it was something more wonderful*