Kitty looked, rubbed her eyes, and looked again. Yes—no, there was no mistake. Faces everywhere. Faces! faces! faces!—a world of faces! All those children’s faces smiling, blinking, nodding; up in the sky, down on the ground. On every flower, on every blade of grass, on every leaf of the trees were faces.
Kitty began to laugh, the effect was so comical; for as the leaves of the trees tossed, the flowers nodded, the water flowed, there were the most extraordinary effects. The faces now melted into each other, now were topsy-turvy; noses came where eyes should be; the hair seemed to grow on chins; the mouths climbed up to the forehead; sometimes it was like a world of faces seen reflected in a vast teapot, nothing was seen but noses and slits of eyes.
“Don’t laugh,” said the child plaintively. “I can’t see your face. It’s myself I see when I look at you.”
“Really,” exclaimed Kitty, “that is most extraordinary!”
“I never see anything but my face, never. We all see our own faces everywhere, wherever we look.”
She glanced, as she spoke, toward a sunflower, and, sure enough, Kitty saw the child’s little face peeping out of the big brown heart; upside down on a dock leaf; grinning from a thistle—there it was again.
“I wish I could see something else than my face,” sobbed the child. “I wish I could see something else.”
Then there rose a chorus of airy, unhappy voices repeating the same words: “Something else than my face; something else than my face.”
And the vision faded away, while in the air a crooning sound was heard, and the words of a lament:
“Oh, no! we would no longer see