Mopsa the Fairy Part 13

Mopsa had been listening to this, and now she said, "I don't love the Queen. She slapped my arm as she went by, and it hurts."

Mopsa showed her little fat arm as she spoke, and there was a red place on it.

"That's odd, too," said the apple-woman; "there's nothing red in a common fairy's veins. They have sap in them: that's why they can't blush."

Just then the sun went down, and Mopsa got up on the apple-woman's lap, and went to sleep; and Jack, being tired, went to his boat and lay down under the purple canopy, his old hound lying at his feet to keep guard over him.

The next morning, when he woke, a pretty voice called to him, "Jack!

Jack!" and he opened his eyes and saw Mopsa. The apple-woman had dressed her in a clean frock and blue shoes, and her hair was so long!

She was standing on the landing-place, close to him. "O Jack! I'm so big," she said. "I grew in the night; look at me."

Jack looked. Yes, Mopsa had grown indeed; she had only just reached to his knee the day before, and now her little bright head, when he measured her, came as high as the second b.u.t.ton of his waistcoat.

"But I hope you will not go on growing so fast as this," said Jack, "or you will be as tall as my mamma is in a week or two,--much too big for me to play with."

CHAPTER X.

MOPSA LEARNS HER LETTERS.

A----apple-pie.

B----bit it.

"How ashamed I am," Jack said, "to think that you don't know even your letters!"

Mopsa replied that she thought that did not signify, and then she and Jack began to play at jumping from the boat on to the bank, and back again; and afterwards, as not a single fairy could be seen, they had breakfast with the apple-woman.

"Where is the Queen?" asked Jack.

The apple-woman answered, "It's not the fashion to ask questions in Fairyland."

"That's a pity," said Jack, "for there are several things that I particularly want to know about this country. Mayn't I even ask how big it is?"

"How big?" said Mopsa,--little Mopsa looking as wise as possible.

"Why, the same size as your world, of course."

Jack laughed. "It's the same world that you call yours," continued Mopsa; "and when I'm a little older, I'll explain it all to you."

"If it's our world," said Jack, "why are none of us in it, excepting me and the apple-woman?"

"That's because you've got something in your world that you call TIME," said Mopsa; "so you talk about NOW, and you talk about THEN."

"And don't you?" asked Jack.

"I do if I want to make you understand," said Mopsa.

The apple-woman laughed, and said, "To think of the pretty thing talking so queen-like already! Yes, that's right, and just what the grown-up fairies say. Go on, and explain it to him if you can."

"You know," said Mopsa, "that your people say there was a time when there were none of them in the world,--a time before they were made.

Well, THIS is that time. This is long ago."

"Nonsense!" said Jack. "Then how do I happen to be here?"

"Because," said Mopsa, "when the albatross brought you, she did not fly with you a long way off, but a long way back,--hundreds and hundreds of years. This is your world, as you can see; but none of your people are here, because they are not made yet. I don't think any of them will be made for a thousand years."

"But I saw the old ships," answered Jack, "in the enchanted bay."

"That was a border country," said Mopsa. "I was asleep while you went through those countries; but these are the real Fairylands."

Jack was very much surprised when he heard Mopsa say these strange things; and as he looked at her, he felt that a sleep was coming over him, and he could not hold up his head. He felt how delightful it was to go to sleep; and though the apple-woman sprang to him, when she observed that he was shutting his eyes, and though he heard her begging and entreating him to keep awake, he did not want to do so; but he let his head sink down on the mossy gra.s.s, which was as soft as a pillow, and there, under the shade of a Guelder rose-tree, that kept dropping its white flowerets all over him, he had this dream:

He thought that Mopsa came running up to him, as he stood by the river, and that he said to her, "Oh, Mopsa, how old we are! We have lived back to the times before Adam and Eve!"

"Yes," said Mopsa; "but I don't feel old. Let us go down the river, and see what we can find."

So they got into the boat, and it floated into the middle of the river, and then made for the opposite bank, where the water was warm and very muddy, and the river became so very wide that it seemed to be afternoon when they got near enough to see it clearly; and what they saw was a boggy country, green, and full of little rills; but the water,--which, as I told you, was thick and muddy,--the water was full of small holes! You never saw water with eyelet-holes in it; but Jack did. On all sides of the boat he saw holes moving about in pairs, and some were so close that he looked and saw their lining: they were lined with pink, and they snorted! Jack was afraid, but he considered that this was such a long time ago that the holes, whatever they were, could not hurt him; but it made him start, notwithstanding, when a huge flat-head reared itself up close to the boat, and he found that the holes were the nostrils of creatures who kept all the rest of themselves under water.

In a minute or two, hundreds of ugly flat-heads popped up, and the boat danced among them as they floundered about in the water.

"I hope they won't upset us," said Jack. "I wish you would land."

Mopsa said she would rather not, because she did not like the hairy elephants.

"There are no such things as hairy elephants," said Jack, in his dream; but he had hardly spoken when out of a wood close at hand some huge creatures, far larger than our elephants, came jogging down to the water. There were forty or fifty of them, and they were covered with what looked like tow. In fact, so coa.r.s.e was their s.h.a.ggy hair that they looked as if they were dressed in door-mats; and when they stood still and shook themselves, such clouds of dust flew out that, as it swept over the river, it almost stifled Jack and Mopsa.

"Odious!" exclaimed Jack, sneezing. "What terrible creatures these are!"

"Well," answered Mopsa, at the other end of the boat (but he could hardly see her for the dust), "then why do you dream of them?"

Jack had just decided to dream of something else, when, with a noise greater than fifty trumpets, the elephants, having shaken out all the dust, came thundering down to the water to bathe in the liquid mud.

They shook the whole country as they plunged; but that was not all.

The awful river-horses rose up, and, with shrill screams, fell upon them, and gave them battle; while up from every rill peeped above the rushes frogs as large as oxen, and with blue and green eyes that gleamed like the eyes of cats.

The frogs croaking, and the shrill trumpeting of the elephants, together with the cries of the river-horses, as all these creatures fought with horn and tusk, and fell on one another, lashing the water into whirlpools, among which the boat danced up and down like a cork,--the blinding spray, and the flapping about of great bats over the boat and in it,--so confused Jack, that Mopsa had spoken to him several times before he answered.

"O Jack!" she said, at last; "if you can't dream any better, I must call the Craken."

"Very well," said Jack. "I'm almost wrapped up and smothered in bats'

wings, so call anything you please."

Thereupon Mopsa whistled softly, and in a minute or two he saw, almost spanning the river, a hundred yards off, a thing like a rainbow, or a slender bridge, or still more, like one ring or coil of an enormous serpent; and presently the creature's head shot up like a fountain, close to the boat, almost as high as a ship's mast. It was the Craken; and when Mopsa saw it, she began to cry, and said, "We are caught in this crowd of creatures, and we cannot get away from the land of dreams. Do help us, Craken!"

Some of the bats that hung to the edges of the boat had wings as large as sails; and the first thing the Craken did was to stoop its lithe neck, pick two or three of them off, and eat them.

"You can swim your boat home under my coils where the water is calm,"

the Craken said, "for she is so extremely old now, that if you do not take care she will drop to pieces before you get back to the present time."