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ciinningest little lady's slippers imaginable; sometimes 

 pink and sometimes yellow, sometimes one pink and one 

 yellow ; and they did not wear gloves. This was undoubtedly 

 by way of making a virtue of necessity, for they had no 

 gloves to wear but only just mittens such as you and I had 

 tied aroimd our necks when we were about their size. The 

 fairies play that these are gloves, because fairies can play 

 anything, and to carry out the game they call them gloves 

 too, — just "little folk's gloves," or if they are in a hurry, 

 "folk's gloves. " You see, we have it all wrong. We call 'em 

 ^^ Fox gloves,^' because we don't know any better. Fancy a 

 fox with gloves on! 



Upon careful thought I am prepared to say that the 

 fairy ladies are no whit behind their human sisters in co- 

 quetry. Every minx of them carries a little vanity bag from 

 which she extracts a tiny Uttle Venus* s Looking-Glass and the 

 cobwebbiest of handkerchiefs made out of Queen Anne's Lace. 

 If nobody is looking they will dab the tips of their fimny 

 little noses with a dainty puff from a milk weed which these 

 little ladies carry as religiously as they do their sachet of 

 fern seeds. / / \ ^ 



In general, a lady's head gear is quite as far beyond my 

 homely descriptive powers as her garments, but with the 

 lady fairies I found myself in luck, for nearly all of them on 

 this occasion wore inverted petunias for hats, and one of the 

 most chic of them all very obligingly explained to me that 

 it was to be a petunia year, and she naively translated for 



