But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing.

I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened--dawn and death and so on--as if _they_ were rational and inevitable.

They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as _necessary_ as the fact that two and one trees make three.

But it is not.

There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination.