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Page 30
It was Susan who remembered best how everything looked--Susan, who had
never been to the country in all her starved little life--that is, if
one excepts the times Margaret MacLean had taken her on the Ward C
"special." She told so well how all the trees and flowers were
fashioned that it was an easy matter putting names to them.
In the center of Tir-na-n'Og towered a great hill; but instead of its
being capped with peak or rocks it was gently hollowed at the top, as
though in the beginning, when it was thrown up molten from the depths
of somewhere, a giant thumb had pressed it down and smoothed it round
and even. All about the brim of it grew hawthorns and rowans and
hazel-trees. In the grass, everywhere, were thousands and millions of
primroses, heart's-ease, and morning-glories; all crowded together, so
Susan said, like the patterns on the Persian carpet in the board-room.
It was all so beautiful and faeryish and heart-desired that "yer'd have
said it wasn't real if yer hadn't ha' knowed it was."
The children stood on the brink of the giant hollow and clapped their
hands for the very joy of seeing it all; and there--a little man
stepped up to them and doffed his cap. The queen wanted them--she was
waiting for them by the throne that very minute; and the little man was
to bring them to her.
Now that throne--according to Susan--was nothing like the thrones one
finds in stories or Journeys through palaces to see. It was not cold,
hard, or forbidding; instead, it was as soft and green and pillowy as
an inflated golf-bunker might be, and just high and comfortable enough
for the baby faeries to discover it and go to sleep there whenever they
felt tired. The throne was full of them when the children looked, and
some one was tumbling them off like so many kittens.
"That is the queen," said the little man, pointing.
The children stood on tiptoes and craned their necks the better to see;
but it was not until they had come quite close that they saw that her
dress was gray, and her hair was gray, and she was small, and her face
was like--
"Bless me if it ain't!" shouted Susan in amazement. "It's Sandy's wee
creepity woman!"
The queen smiled when she saw them. She reached out her hands and
patted theirs in turn, asking, "Now what is your name, dearie?"
"Are ye sure ye're the queen?" gasped Bridget.
"Maybe I am--and maybe I'm not," was the answer.
"Then ye been't the wee gray woman--back yonder?" asked Sandy.
"Maybe I'm not--and maybe I am." And then she laughed. "Dear
children, it doesn't matter in the least who I am. I look a hundred
different ways to a hundred different people. Now let me see--I think
you wanted some--clothes."
A long, rapturous sigh was the only answer. It lasted while the queen
got down on her knees--just like an every-day, ordinary person--and
pulled from under the throne a great carved chest. She threw open the
lid wide; and there, heaped to the top and spilling over, were dresses
and mantles and coats and trousers and caps. They were all lengths,
sizes, and fashions--just what you most wanted after you had been in
bed for years and never worn anything but a hospital shirt; and
everything was made of cloth o' dreams and embroidered with pearls from
the River of Make-Believe.
"You can choose whatever you like, dearies," said the queen. And
that--according to Susan--was the best of all.
Next came the dancing; the Apostles remembered about that
co-operatively. They had donned pants of pink and yellow,
respectively, with shirts of royal purple and striked stockings, when
the pipers began to play. James said it sounded like soldiers
marching; John was certain that it was more like a circus; but I am
inclined to believe that they played "The Music of Glad Memories" and
"What-is-Sure-to-Come-True," for those are the two popular airs in
Tir-na-n'Og.
Away and away must have danced pairs of little feet that had never
danced before, and pairs of old feet that had long ago forgotten how;
and millions of faery feet, for no one can dance half as joyously as
when faeries dance with them. And I have heard it said that the pipers
there can play sadness into gladness, and tears into laughter, and old
age young again; and that those who have ever danced to the music of
faery pipes never really grow heavy-hearted again.
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