as neither you nor I may ever hope to look upon, and yet we know nothing
of this because they say nothing of it, going their own ways like common
folks, and as though they saw nothing in an egg but the meat.

Dame Margery Twist of Tavistock town was not one of these wise folks who
hold their tongues; she was a good, gossiping, chattering old soul,
whose hen never hatched a chick but all of the neighbors knew of it, as
the saying goes. The poor old creature had only one eye; how she lost
the other you shall presently hear, and also how her wonderful tulip
garden became like anybody else's tulip garden.

Dame Margery Twist lived all alone with a great tabby cat. She dwelt in
a little cottage that stood back from the road, and just across the way
from the butcher's shop. All within was as neat and as bright as a new
pin, so that it was a delight just to look upon the row of blue dishes
upon the dresser, the pewter pipkins as bright as silver, or the sanded
floor, as clean as your mother's table. Over the cottage twined sweet
woodbines, so that the air was ladened with their fragrance in the
summer-time, when the busy, yellow-legged bees droned amid the blossoms
from the two hives that stood along against the wall. But the wonder of
the garden was the tulip bed, for there were no tulips in all England
like them, and folks came from far and near, only to look upon them and
to smell their fragrance. They stood in double rows, and were of all
colors--white, yellow, red, purple, and pied. They bloomed early, and
lasted later than any others, and, when they were in flower, all the air
was filled with their perfume.

Now all of these things happened before the smoke of the factories and
the rattling of the steam-cars had driven the fairy folks away from this
world into No-man's-land, and this was the secret of the dame's fine