tremendously busy, you know, as if they had not a moment to spare, but
if you were to ask them what they are doing, they could not tell you
in the least. They are frightfully ignorant, and everything they do
is make-believe. They have a postman, but he never calls except at
Christmas with his little box, and though they have beautiful schools,
nothing is taught in them; the youngest child being chief person is
always elected mistress, and when she has called the roll, they all go
out for a walk and never come back. It is a very noticeable thing
that, in fairy families, the youngest is always chief person, and
usually becomes a prince or princess, and children remember this, and
think it must be so among humans also, and that is why they are often
made uneasy when they come upon their mother furtively putting new
frills on the basinette.

You have probably observed that your baby-sister wants to do all sorts
of things that your mother and her nurse want her not to do: to stand
up at sitting-down time, and to sit down at standing-up time, for
instance, or to wake up when she should fall asleep, or to crawl on
the floor when she is wearing her best frock, and so on, and perhaps
you put this down to naughtiness. But it is not; it simply means that
she is doing as she has seen the fairies do; she begins by following
their ways, and it takes about two years to get her into the human
ways. Her fits of passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually
called teething, are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation,
because we don't understand her, though she is talking an intelligible
language. She is talking fairy. The reason mothers and nurses know
what her remarks mean, before other people know, as that "Guch" means
"Give it to me at once," while "Wa" is "Why do you wear such a funny
hat?" is because, mixing so much with babies, they have picked up a
little of the fairy language.