treacle, or senna tea, or being kept at home when you want to go
out, or being obliged to go to bed early and have gruel instead
of cake and sweetmeats. They don't want the doctors, because if
you cut your finger it gets well directly, and even when people
are killed, or are turned into stones, or when anything else
unpleasant happens, it can all be put right in a minute or two.
All you have to do when you are in trouble is to go and look for
some wrinkled old woman in a patched old brown cloak, and be
very civil to her, and to do cheerfully and kindly any service
she asks of you, and then she will throw off the dark cloak, and
become a young and beautiful Fairy Queen, and wave her magic
wand, and everything will fall out just as you would like to
have it.

As to Time, they take no note of it in Fairy Land. The Princess
falls asleep for a hundred years, and wakes up quite rosy, and
young, and beautiful. Friends and sweethearts are parted for
years, and nobody seems to think they have grown older when they
meet, or that life has become shorter, and so they fall to their
youthful talk as if nothing had happened. Thus the dwellers in
Fairy Land have no cares about chronology. With them there is no
past or future; it is all present--so there are no disagreeable
dates to learn, nor tables of kings, and when they reigned, or
who succeeded them, or what battles they fought, or anything of
that kind. Indeed there are no such facts to be learned, for
when kings are wicked in Fairy Land, a powerful magician comes
and twists their heads off, or puts them to death somehow; and
when they are good kings they seem to live for ever, and always
to be wearing rich robes and royal golden crowns, and to be
entertaining Fairy Queens, and receiving handsome brilliant