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.