"Do they live IN the flowers?" I said.
"I cannot tell," she replied. "There is something in it I do not
understand. Sometimes they disappear altogether, even from me, though
I know they are near. They seem to die always with the flowers they
resemble, and by whose names they are called; but whether they return to
life with the fresh flowers, or, whether it be new flowers, new fairies,
I cannot tell. They have as many sorts of dispositions as men and women,
while their moods are yet more variable; twenty different expressions
will cross their little faces in half a minute. I often amuse myself
with watching them, but I have never been able to make personal
acquaintance with any of them. If I speak to one, he or she looks up in
my face, as if I were not worth heeding, gives a little laugh, and runs
away." Here the woman started, as if suddenly recollecting herself, and
said in a low voice to her daughter, "Make haste--go and watch him, and
see in what direction he goes."
I may as well mention here, that the conclusion I arrived at from the
observations I was afterwards able to make, was, that the flowers die
because the fairies go away; not that the fairies disappear because
the flowers die. The flowers seem a sort of houses for them, or outer
bodies, which they can put on or off when they please. Just as you could
form some idea of the nature of a man from the kind of house he built,
if he followed his own taste, so you could, without seeing the fairies,
tell what any one of them is like, by looking at the flower till you
feel that you understand it. For just what the flower says to you, would
the face and form of the fairy say; only so much more plainly as a face
and human figure can express more than a flower. For the house or the
clothes, though like the inhabitant or the wearer, cannot be wrought
into an equal power of utterance. Yet you would see a strange
resemblance, almost oneness, between the flower and the fairy, which you
could not describe, but which described itself to you. Whether all the
flowers have fairies, I cannot determine, any more than I can be sure
whether all men and women have souls.
The woman and I continued the conversation for a few minutes longer. I
was much interested by the information she gave me, and astonished
at the language in which she was able to convey it. It seemed that
intercourse with the fairies was no bad education in itself. But now the
daughter returned with the news, that the Ash had just gone away in a
south-westerly direction; and, as my course seemed to lie eastward, she
hoped I should be in no danger of meeting him if I departed at once.
I looked out of the little window, and there stood the ash-tree, to my
eyes the same as before; but I believed that they knew better than I
did, and prepared to go. I pulled out my purse, but to my dismay there
was nothing in it. The woman with a smile begged me not to trouble
myself, for money was not of the slightest use there; and as I might
meet with people in my journeys whom I could not recognise to be
fairies, it was well I had no money to offer, for nothing offended them
so much.