“Come up,” they said. “You don’t know what fun it is!”
“Shall I go?” said Tina to the fairy.
“Yes,” she said. “These are my friends. My father, the West Wind, is coming to-night to blow down the nuts, and the squirrels will get them all; it is their tree, anyhow.”
Tina went up to the tree, and was going to climb up, when suddenly she felt herself lifted off her feet, and before she could turn around she was sitting on a limb of the tree, with three children near her.
“We have been waiting for you ever so long,” said they. “What made you so late?”
“I stopped to talk to the hares,” said she. “I didn’t know you were waiting.”
Just then a squirrel whisked by them, stopping to look over his shoulder at them, and saying, “Don’t take too many.”
“We won’t,” said they.
“I never knew squirrels and such things could talk,” said Tina.