“NO! I’ll ask Mother to take me to the sea. She will.”
“Then—good-bye!”
And she decked Fleuriss’s fern dress with beautiful flowers—a crown of them and a girdle. A sweet wind arose, carrying the scent of Eepersip’s flowers to Fleuriss. A few butterflies were blown over to her. Eepersip stood on her tiptoes an instant: then, quick as a flash, she whirled about and bounded off, free—relieved of a gigantic burden.
She went up to the lovely hill and stayed there a few days, amid the dancing butterflies and the gorgeous roses. At the lake she would dream hour after hour and watch the little jewelled minnows playing about the white stones and shining pebbles. In the evening she crept into a great bed of thick vines with flowers of white and gold, and listened to the lapping of the waves and watched the twinkling fireflies. They were her favourites, those poor ignorant little insects. She loved them as well as the delicate, gauzy butterflies, the sweeping swallows with their slim white wings, or the great gold-and-black bees. She adored them all, but the tiny blue-black fireflies, with thin gauze wings and the spot of phosphorescence showing now and then, were perhaps the loveliest of all. How she liked to see them playing about at dusk, sparkling and gleaming—little stars of the trees, in golden waves across the sky.
Sometimes, when they began to come out, she would go forth and dance and skip with myriads of them clustered in her hair. Around each invisible fern and blossom in her dress would gather a row of the little insects, until finally one could have seen her entire form bordered with fireflies. And besides these which alighted on her dress, thousands gathered swarming about her, so that her head was entirely hidden in a maze of gold.
Sometimes she would sleep at night and in the daytime play with the butterflies, birds, and bees. But now she began to sleep more and more in the day and play about at night.
One cool morning Eepersip went down the lovely hill that she and Fleuriss had found. She walked down and then out toward the pastured side of the hill. Here she stayed for a long time. She lived in the golden smell of steeple-bush, and instead of the wild strawberries that she had had on the hill she found great crops of blueberries. And in this pasture she had a sample of a new food—checkerberries. To be sure, she had eaten the leaves often enough, but to see the waxen white berries was quite new. These also she tasted and found greatly to her liking. She would lie and eat hundreds of those white berries which tasted of the woods. They were almost as good as the blueberries.
Now this pasture formed a steep hill, and one delicious morning when a soft, warm wind was blowing rather strongly, Eepersip climbed to the top of it. And oh, what a sight met her dark brown eyes! Far and near, far and near rose mountains, mountains, mountains! Stretching away, fold after fold, layer after layer, rose marvellous blue peaks, with the dazzling light of the sun brightening the white granite at some of their tops. Peak after peak rose up around her, lake after lake stretched out in the dim blue distance, with the sun striking them until they were a mass of gold, like great precious stones in that setting of purple mountains. She could make out three or four farmhouses, but no villages. She stood there entranced, watching.
Then down she dashed, through the tall grass sprinkled with buttercups and daisies. It seemed miles. but it also seemed no more than seconds. At last she found herself by the shore of a cobalt lake. It was almost perfectly round, with a group of tiny green islets sprinkled in it like a handful of emerald beads. No house could Eepersip see, for the lake was entirely surrounded with low green-blue hills. The shore was for the most part soft white sand, fine as pepper. With a cry of joy at the discovery of this beautiful little lake Eepersip dashed into it and swam in the cool of those waters from the mountains. And then she saw, playing up and down in the shallow water just off one of those many beaches, a shoal of slim fishes. They were all silver except one or two that were gold, and they had rather bulging red eyes.