digging for pearls." And when I asked her what so many pearls were
for she said to me: "To feed the pigs of course."

"But do the pigs like pearls?" I said to her.

"Of course they don't," she said. And I would have pressed the matter
further but the old black cat had come out of the cottage and was
looking at me whimsically and saying nothing so that I knew I was
asking silly questions. And I asked instead why some of the poets
were idle and were watching butterflies without being beaten. And she
said: "The butterflies know where the pearls are hidden and they are
waiting for one to alight above the buried treasure. They cannot dig
until they know where to dig." And all of a sudden a faun came out of
a rhododendron forest and began to dance upon a disk of bronze in
which a fountain was set; and the sound of his two hooves dancing on
the bronze was beautiful as bells.

"Tea-bell," said the witch; and all the poets threw down their spades
and followed her into the house, and I followed them; but the witch
and all of us followed the black cat, who arched his back and lifted
his tail and walked along the garden-path of blue enamelled tiles and
through the black-thatched porch and the open, oaken door and into a
little room where tea was ready. And in the garden the flowers began
to sing and the fountain tinkled on the disk of bronze. And I learned
that the fountain came from an otherwise unknown sea, and sometimes it
threw gilded fragments up from the wrecks of unheard-of galleons,
foundered in storms of some sea that was nowhere in the world; or
battered to bits in wars waged with we know not whom. Some said that
it was salt because of the sea and others that it was salt with
mariners' tears. And some of the poets took large flowers out of