Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 120.djvu/876

 864 THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB cess and thrilled at her gallant rescue by the brave prince who came just in time. Still, I could not help wondering a little about those who had no rescuer, but were killed by the dragon. I have wandered through many witches' collections of the original man- uscripts from which all fairy-tales were written; but I found no mention of any of these maidens for a long time. At last one night, in the oldest, dustiest, most disorderly museum of all, I found a handful of dried leaves and grasses. 'What are these?' I asked the old witch who was the caretaker. ' They are sensitive leaves, that took part in a fairy story; very little leaves, that did not know yet that this was not a part of the real story. I can make out some of the words, but I cannot read the writing of the wind and the sea, nor the pictures of the shadows on the grass/ We worked over them together, and at last understood as much of the rec- ord as had not been destroyed. She was the thirty-seventh maiden to be led out from the city and chained to the rock. Not a very large con- course came with her. The whole city had poured forth for the first maiden and had suffered even more, perhaps, for the second and third. But there had been so many, and life had to go on in some way. They chained her to the rock with pitying words and left her alone. Here the one leaf is mutilated. The next says that she stood quietly watch- ing the sunshine on the ocean and thinking as she waited : ' I am not very beautiful, so that no one would fight the dragon for me. Still I should have loved to live. There were more beautiful ones who were chained here, and I suppose there will be many more. There were braver ones and some not so brave. Some cried and some shrieked and some were just quiet all the time. I cried a little and then I was quiet. I wonder if they all loved to live as much as I? I wonder if there have been many days in the world as beautiful as this is? I wonder But it had to be this way or the fairy-tale would not have come out right/ There was nothing more except one tiny leaf which told how a bird kept whistling as she waited. . * Entirely unimportant,' said the old caretaker; 'we know from the rest of the story that the monster came. The leaves might as well be thrown away. What does it matter what happens to a minor character?' 'Still, I suppose it rather hurt,* I urged. ' Perhaps she felt it as much as if it had been important. Perhaps the minor characters do feel, sometimes, most foolishly feel as bitterly as if their tragedy did count somewhere : the private soldiers whose deaths are count- ed by hundreds; patient women into whose lives nothing of importance has ever come or will ever come, who are mere background for more vivid lives, bits of babies who are born and die again in agony, so soon; all those in the monotonous danger of mines and fac- tories, ground to unheeded dust be- neath other lives is there never, in all that indistinguishable mass, a de- spairing wish to be something more than an atom in a numbered nothing- ness? Somehow, somewhere, do the minor characters never count?' 'No,' said the old witch indifferently, contemptuously, 'the minor charac- ters have never counted at all.' And then an odd change came slowlj into her face. A light I never saw in fairy-land broke over her, a light as from the dawning of a sun I had not seen. 'Never,' she said, 'never as yet.' NOTE. The title-page and index for the half-yearly volume will be supplied to readers of the magazine, if the request is made within thirty days.