I thanked her very warmly for her solution, though it was but partial;
wondering much that in her, as in woman I met on my first entering the
forest, there should be such superiority to her apparent condition. Here
she left me to take some rest; though, indeed, I was too much agitated
to rest in any other way than by simply ceasing to move.
In half an hour, I heard a heavy step approach and enter the house. A
jolly voice, whose slight huskiness appeared to proceed from overmuch
laughter, called out "Betsy, the pigs' trough is quite empty, and that
is a pity. Let them swill, lass! They're of no use but to get fat. Ha!
ha! ha! Gluttony is not forbidden in their commandments. Ha! ha! ha!"
The very voice, kind and jovial, seemed to disrobe the room of the
strange look which all new places wear--to disenchant it out of the
realm of the ideal into that of the actual. It began to look as if I
had known every corner of it for twenty years; and when, soon after, the
dame came and fetched me to partake of their early supper, the grasp of
his great hand, and the harvest-moon of his benevolent face, which was
needed to light up the rotundity of the globe beneath it, produced such
a reaction in me, that, for a moment, I could hardly believe that there
was a Fairy Land; and that all I had passed through since I left home,
had not been the wandering dream of a diseased imagination, operating on
a too mobile frame, not merely causing me indeed to travel, but peopling
for me with vague phantoms the regions through which my actual steps
had led me. But the next moment my eye fell upon a little girl who was
sitting in the chimney-corner, with a little book open on her knee, from
which she had apparently just looked up to fix great inquiring eyes upon
me. I believed in Fairy Land again. She went on with her reading, as
soon as she saw that I observed her looking at me. I went near, and
peeping over her shoulder, saw that she was reading "The History of
Graciosa and Percinet."
"Very improving book, sir," remarked the old farmer, with a
good-humoured laugh. "We are in the very hottest corner of Fairy Land
here. Ha! ha! Stormy night, last night, sir."
"Was it, indeed?" I rejoined. "It was not so with me. A lovelier night I
never saw." "Indeed! Where were you last night?"