"But that night, as he walked alone in the moonlight by the shore, he suddenly saw on the sand in front of him a radiant fairy, spinning on a silver spinning-wheel a wonderful thread of gold. Without daring to breathe he stood and looked at her, and then he saw that it was from the rays of moonlight that she was spinning the thread. All at once she rose and came to where he was standing.
"'Here is the thread of love,' she said to him, and then she showed him how to tie the true lover's knot in it. 'With this you may win our Dodora,' the fairy added, and then suddenly like a breath of perfume she was gone, leaving the thread of gold in the prince's hands.
"And all that night the prince tied and retied the true lover's knot, as the fairy had showed him, and next morning he hurried with it to the fisherman's cottage where Dodora lived. And when Dodora saw him coming, she did not dance away as she had always done before, but went forward to meet him, and took his hand. Then suddenly she snatched the golden thread from him and ran, with the prince after her. She ran fast, but he was about to overtake her, when Dodora dropped the knot into the weeds, and then all at once she stopped, for the wonderful thread had suddenly become a great tangle of gold that held Dodora fast, and she could not get away. So the prince overtook her, and led her to his palace, where they lived happily for a long time. And the thread of love grew as a wonderful vine that had no root in the earth, but twined about the weeds and spread over the country in many places. Some called it Dodora, after the princess, and this was changed at last to 'dodder' by those who did not know. Others called it golden thread, and still others called it love-vine, and tied true lover's knots in it which they threw over their shoulders on moonlight nights. If these knots grew they won their sweethearts. They did not always grow, but about the palace of the prince the vine flourished in a golden mass, and the prince, never forgetting the wonderful night when it had been spun for him out of moonbeams, let it grow through all the world, to become the golden thread of love."
OCTOBER
OCTOBER
I
SEEDS ARE MADE TO BE PLANTED
OCTOBER brought seedtime in the little garden. Many seeds had ripened during the summer, and Prue had already gathered some of the tiny black flakes from the opened pods of her precious pinks, and Davy had saved some seed pease. But October was the real harvest-time. The children took a lot of white envelopes, and upon them Davy printed the names of all the seeds they expected to gather. Into these envelopes they put carefully the different little black and brown and white seeds after they had picked and blown the husks all away, so, as Davy said, they would look just like seeds bought at the store.