§) the Scented garden f% 



lifted and we are afforded glimpses, all too fleeting, of a 

 busy, happy little people, as interested apparently in us 

 as we are in them. It is a curious fact that in all ages there 

 has been the belief that though fairies were seen in former 

 days, they could no longer be seen by mortal eyes. 

 Chaucer tells us that in King Arthur's days all this land 

 was filled with fairy folk, and that the elf queen and her 

 merry court danced often in our green meadows, but that 

 was many hundred years ago and ' now can no man see 

 non elves mo.' Yet nearly two hundred years later the 

 same fairy queen and her train were known and loved by 

 one greater than Chaucer. 



Though immortal, the fairies have changed as the 

 human race has changed. The fairies who dance in our 

 meadows, disport themselves in our gardens and warm 

 themselves by our firesides bear little resemblance to the 

 elves who peopled the trackless wastes of heath and moor, 

 the terror-infested bogs and the impenetrable forests of 

 Saxon days. These elves were mighty of stature, fear- 

 some and characteristic of an age when man fought with 

 Nature, wresting from her the land, and when unseen 

 powers resented this loss of their domains. Place-names in 

 the more remote parts of Great Britain still recall the 

 memory of the supernatural terror with which the water 

 elves of the dark mere pools, * the muckle mark-steppers ' 

 of the lonely moors and the fiends of the mists inspired 

 our ancestors. The sea-elves were impersonations of the 

 fury of the waves, and the wolf-haunted mark was a 

 resort of creatures, not of sun, but of darkness, akin to the 

 Formon in Irish mythic history, and the Mallt-y-nos, 

 the huge uncouth creatures immortalized by the Welsh 

 bards. Yet even in those days there were elves of sur- 

 ioo 



