They were reclining on the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer (for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling _cortege_), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little elf, had gone round the town to reconnoitre.
"Bless me!" said the lord treasurer; "what a mad freak is this! Crossing that immense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this?
One may see that the fairies thrive ill here." "You are always discontented, my lord," said Pipalee; "but then you are somewhat too old to travel,--at least, unless you go in your nutshell and four." The lord treasurer did not like this remark, so he muttered a peevish pshaw, and took a pinch of honeysuckle dust to console himself for being forced to put up with so much frivolity.
At this moment, ere the moon was yet at her middest height, Nymphalin joined her subjects.
"I have just returned," said she, with a melancholy expression on her countenance, "from a scene that has almost renewed in me that sympathy with human beings which of late years our race has well-nigh relinquished.
"I hurried through the town without noticing much food for adventure.
I paused for a moment on a fat citizen's pillow, and bade him dream of love.

He woke in a fright, and ran down to see that his cheeses were safe.

I swept with a light wing over a politician's eyes, and straightway he dreamed of theatres and music.

I caught an undertaker in his first nap, and I have left him whirled into a waltz.

For what would be sleep if it did not contrast life?
Then I came to a solitary chamber, in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer, and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was on the leaves of the rose.