WOMAN OF THE Think with passion
HAYSTACK. That shall fashion
Life's entire design well-planned;
Voice (still nearer). While the busy Pleiades,
ROGERS. Sisters to the Hyades,
Voice (quite close). Seven by seven,
Across the heaven,
ROGERS. Light desire
With their fire!
Voice (in his ear). Working cunningly together in a soft and
tireless band,
Sweetly linking
All our thinking,
In the Net of Sympathy that brings back
Fairyland!'
Mother kept close to her husband; she felt a little bewildered, and uncertain in her movements; it was her first conscious experience of being out. She wanted to go in every direction at once; for she knew everybody in the village, knew all their troubles and perplexities, and felt the call from every house.
'Steady,' he told her; 'one thing at a time, you know.' Her thoughts, he saw, had turned across the sea to Ireland where her strongest ties were. Ireland seemed close, and quite as accessible as the village. Her friend of the Haystack, on the other hand, seemed a long way off by comparison.
'That's because Henry never realised her personality very clearly,' said Daddy, seeing by her colour that she needed explanation. 'When creating all these Garden Sprites, he didn't think her sharply, vividly enough to make her effective. He just felt that a haystack suggested the elderly spread of a bulky and untidy old woman whose frame had settled beneath too many clothes, till she had collapsed into a field and stuck there. But he left her where he found her. He assigned no duties to her. She's only half alive. As a rule, she merely sits—just "stays put"—until some one moves her.'
Mother turned and saw her far in the rear, settling down comfortably upon a flat roof near the church. She rather envied her amiable disposition. It seemed so safe. Every one else was alive with such dangerous activity.
'Are we going much further—?' she began, when Monkey rushed by, caught up the sentence, and discharged herself with impudence into Daddy.
'Which is right, "further" or "farther"?' she asked with a flash of light.
'Further, of course,' said unsuspecting Mother.
'But "further" sounds "farther," she cried, with a burst of laughter that died away with her passage of meteoric brilliance—into the body of the woods beyond.
'But the other Sprites, you see, are real and active,' continued Daddy, ignoring the interruption as though accustomed to it, because he thought out clearly every detail. 'They're alive enough to haunt a house or garden till sensitive people become aware of them and declare they've seen a ghost.'