"Sleep? Oh no!" answered the bewildered child. "Did you see the battle?"
"Battle!" screamed all the children. "Why, Charley, you must be getting crazy!"
"Not at all," said Charley, very earnestly, "this time it really happened;" and he told of the battle of the fairies, while the children opened their eyes and mouths so wide with astonishment, that their faces looked all holes; and they stared with all their might up at the moonbeams and down into the water, in the hope that at least some one fairy might have found it necessary to see Charley safe on dry land; but I am sorry to have to relate that they were not gratified with a sight, though their very eye-balls stuck out, so intense and eager did they look, and so sure was Charley that he had not been asleep.
Had he been asleep?
And now, for more than a month after this, Charley and the rest of the children lived a most delightful life. They were up at drum-beat every morning. They would not have missed a parade on any account whatever, that is, all except Charley, and he enjoyed it almost as much as the rest. They were so enthusiastic and glowing in their descriptions. They even went to a stag-dance at night, and almost killed themselves laughing at the cadets.
This stag-dance is performed on the green. A ring is formed, and a tallow candle is stuck in a cut potato, and placed at intervals round the circle; and within this not very brilliant illumination, the cadets dance with each other to the excellent music of the band. Those who personate ladies, take hold of their little bob-tailed jackets, and prink and mince, and take fine airs upon themselves, and look so precisely like fine ladies, that the real fine ladies looking at them, want to give them a good shaking.
But the children went off into fits of laughter at the long and quizzical shadows on the ground. When the cadets dance a figure, their shadows look like a company of sickly, melancholy monkeys, which dodge about in a distracting way, and look so irre sistibly funny, that everybody shouts with laughter—and it is a very merry spectacle.
Then this pleasant family had the most delightful tea parties in an arbor at the back of the house. To be sure the ear-wigs and daddy-long-legs, would drop into their tea once in a while, making them first squeal, and jump up, and then laugh, and a grasshopper or two, would hop suddenly on the cake, and hop more suddenly off, before they could catch him; but what of that? Some people shriek so if a grasshopper hops near them, you would think it was an elephant come to pack them up in his trunk, for the rest of their lives; but these children had more sense, and did not mind a little insect a thousand times smaller than themselves.
And now I must come to a sad, sad part of my story—I dread to begin it—and would gladly have told you a great deal more about the fairies, and what they did for Charley; but Mr. Appleton says, you would not like to have the same story go through two books, and this, I am afraid, is already too long.