Sitting there at my grandmother's feet listening to her I actually forgot my troubles, though I was in the very drawing-room I had learnt so to dread, within a few yards of the cupboard I dared not even glance at.
"There came a little pause in the conversation; I leaned my head against my grandmother's knee.
"'I wish there were fairies now,' I said.

'Don't you, grandmother ?' "Grandmother said 'no, on the whole she preferred things being as they were.' There were _some_ fairies certainly she would be sorry to lose, Princess Sweet-temper, and Lady Make-the-best-of-it, and old Madame Tidy, and, most of all perhaps, the beautiful fairy _Candour_.

I laughed at her funny way of saying things, but yet something in her last words made the uneasy feeling come back again.

Then my grandmother went on talking in a different tone.
"'Do you know, Nelly,' she said, 'queer things happen sometimes that one would be half inclined to put down to fairies if one did not know better ?' "I pricked up my ears.
"'Do tell me what sort of things, grandmother,' I said eagerly.
"'Well'-- she went on, speaking rather slowly and gravely, and very distinctly--'the other day an extraordinary thing happened among my china cups in that cupboard over there.

I had one pink cup, on the side of which was--or is--the picture of a shepherdess curtseying to a shepherd.
Now this shepherdess when I bought the cup, which was only a few days ago, was dressed--I am _perfectly_ certain of it, for her dress was just the same as one I have upstairs in my collection--in a pale pink or salmon-coloured skirt, looped up over a pea-green slip--the picture of the shepherdess is repeated again on the saucer, and there it still is as I tell you.