Page:The Allies Fairy Book.djvu/183

 woods, castles and fortresses, and the armed vessels of the “Beggars” guarding the coasts.

Often at night they went up on the top of the Tower, and seated on the platform they would talk of fierce battles and happy loves past and yet to be. Hence, they looked down at the sea, which, in the warm summer weather, broke in shining ripples of foam along the shore, throwing them upon the isles like phantoms of fire. And Nele trembled when she saw over the “polders” the will-o’-the-wisps, which are, they say, the souls of the poor dead. And all those places had been battlefields.

These will-o’-the-wisps flitted from the polders, and ran along the dikes: then they returned to the polders, as if loath to leave the bodies from which they had come. One night Nele said to Ulenspiegel: “See how many of them there are in Dreiveland, and how high they are flying; I see most over the Isle of Birds. Will you come there with me, Thyl? We will take the balm that shows things invisible to mortal eyes.”

Ulenspiegel replied:

“If it is that balm which made me go to the great Sabbath, I have no more faith in it than in an empty dream.”

“You must not deny the power of charms,” said Nele. “Come, Ulenspiegel.”

“I will come.” The next day he asked the magistrate for a keen-eyed and faithful veteran to act as his substitute, to guard the Tower and watch over the country. Then he set out with Nele for the Isle of Birds. Making their way through fields and by dikes they saw little verdant islets, encircled by the waters of the sea, and on grassy hills that reached as far as the dunes, innumerable plovers and seagulls, which, keeping quite motionless, made as it were white islands with their bodies; thousands of these birds were flying overhead. The ground was