Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/533



LONG time ago—a very long time—I was young, and often heard people complain of a troublesome little creature who made her way in by the window, after she had been driven out at the door. She was so light and so tiny that she might have been said to float rather than to walk, and my parents compared her to a little fairy. The servants detested her, and sent her flying with their dusting brushes; but they had no sooner dislodged her from one resting-place than she re-appeared at another.

She was always dressed in a slatternly trailing grey gown, and a sort of veil which the least breath of wind sent whirling about her head with its yellowish dishevelled locks.

Seeing her so persecuted made me take pity on her, and I willingly allowed her to rest herself in my little garden, though she oppressed my flowers a great deal. I talked with her, but without ever being able to draw from her a single word of common sense. She wished to touch everything, saying she was doing no harm. I got scolded for tolerating her, and when I had allowed her to come too near me, I was sent to wash myself and change my clothes, and was even threatened with being called by her name.

It was such a bad name that I dreaded it greatly. She was so dirty that some said she slept on the sweepings of the houses and streets; and that that was why she was called Fairy Dust.

"Why are you so dirty?" I asked her, one day, when she wanted to kiss me.

"You are a stupid to be afraid of me," she answered, laughingly; "you belong to me, and resemble me more than you think. But you are a child, the slave of ignorance, and I should waste my time by trying to make you understand."

"Come," I said, "you seem inclined to talk sense at last. Explain to me what you have just said."

"I can't talk to you here," she replied. "I have too much to say to you, and, as soon as I settle down in any part of your house I am brushed away with contempt; but, if you wish to know who I am, call me three times to-night as soon as you fall asleep."

That said, she hurried away, uttering a hearty laugh, and I seemed to see her dissolve into a mist of gold, reddened by the setting sun.