understand. Sometimes they disappear altogether, even from me,
though I know they are near. They seem to die always with the
flowers they resemble, and by whose names they are called; but
whether they return to life with the fresh flowers, or, whether
it be new flowers, new fairies, I cannot tell. They have as many
sorts of dispositions as men and women, while their moods are yet
more variable; twenty different expressions will cross their
little faces in half a minute. I often amuse myself with
watching them, but I have never been able to make personal
acquaintance with any of them. If I speak to one, he or she
looks up in my face, as if I were not worth heeding, gives a
little laugh, and runs away." Here the woman started, as if
suddenly recollecting herself, and said in a low voice to her
daughter, "Make haste--go and watch him, and see in what
direction he goes."

I may as well mention here, that the conclusion I arrived at from
the observations I was afterwards able to make, was, that the
flowers die because the fairies go away; not that the fairies
disappear because the flowers die. The flowers seem a sort of
houses for them, or outer bodies, which they can put on or off
when they please. Just as you could form some idea of the nature
of a man from the kind of house he built, if he followed his own
taste, so you could, without seeing the fairies, tell what any
one of them is like, by looking at the flower till you feel that
you understand it. For just what the flower says to you, would
the face and form of the fairy say; only so much more plainly as
a face and human figure can express more than a flower. For the
house or the clothes, though like the inhabitant or the wearer,
cannot be wrought into an equal power of utterance. Yet you