hole with her tail to lay her eggs in, before the frost catches her and
ends her like the rest: though all things, I say, seem dead, yet there is
plenty of life around you, at your feet, I may almost say in the very
stones on which you tread. And though the place itself be dreary enough,
a sheet of flat heather and a little glen in it, with banks of dead fern,
and a brown bog between them, and a few fir-trees struggling up--yet, if
you only have eyes to see it, that little bit of glen is beautiful and
wonderful,--so beautiful and so wonderful and so cunningly devised, that
it took thousands of years to make it; and it is not, I believe, half
finished yet.

How do I know all that? Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who lives up
here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if people have but
eyes to see her. What is her name? I cannot tell. The best name that I
can give her (and I think it must be something like her real name,
because she will always answer if you call her by it patiently and
reverently) is Madam How. She will come in good time, if she is called,
even by a little child. And she will let us see her at her work, and,
what is more, teach us to copy her. But there is another fairy here
likewise, whom we can hardly hope to see. Very thankful should we be if
she lifted even the smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for a
moment if it were but her finger tip--so beautiful is she, and yet so
awful too. But that sight, I believe, would not make us proud, as if we
had had some great privilege. No, my dear child: it would make us feel
smaller, and meaner, and more stupid and more ignorant than we had ever
felt in our lives before; at the same time it would make us wiser than
ever we were in our lives before--that one glimpse of the great glory of
her whom we call Lady Why.

But I will say more of her presently. We must talk first with Madam How,