mysterious, magical life of the days when the whole world was young, it
is ten to one that they will never find out about it at all, for the
most of us do not keep ourselves like children always, though surely we
have all been told plainly enough that that is what we ought to do.

This little girl's mother is rather a strange sort of woman. I do not
know that she exactly disagrees with us about these stories that we
both like so much, but she seems to have a different way of looking at
them from ours. I sometimes suspect that she does not even believe in
fairies at all, that she never so much as thought she saw a ghost,
that, if she heard a dozen wild horses galloping over the roof of the
house and then flying away into the sky, she would think it was only
the wind, and that she is no more afraid of ogres than of policemen.
Still she is a woman whom one cannot help liking, in some respects.

But one day she said something to the little girl that surprised me,
and made me think that perhaps I had done her injustice. The child came
to me with a face full of perplexity and said: "What do you suppose
mamma just told me?"

"I am sure I can't guess," I replied; "your mother tells you such
ridiculous things that I am always afraid to think what will be the
next. Perhaps she says that William Tell didn't shoot an apple off his
little boy's head, or that the baker's wife didn't box King Alfred's
ears for letting the cakes burn."

"Oh, no," said the child, "it isn't a bit like that; she says that you
can see pictures in the fire sometimes--men and horses and trees and
all kinds of things."