The fairies flew crowding into London and the other cities which they had forsaken; and did not come alone. Gnomes, thousandfold, also came riding in, mounted on all manner of birds--goldfinches and tits, robins and wrens, and others of the fine companionage of the feathered kingdom. The monopoly of King Sparrow was over. He was kept in his proper place, and became a decent and tolerant Bohemian.
Later in the summer season--when soft is the sun--bright-coloured butterflies fluttered carelessly out of the country into the radiant streets. Several birds went open-mouthed to greet them; but the fairy power was so potent that the lingering things of beauty--the living smiles of Psyche--were not touched.
Fire-flies were seen darting about the Royal Exchange. Swallows played over the waters of the Thames.
London became worthier still of its various newcomers. It cleaned and decked itself so rapidly that far-travelled sailormen, returning to the Pool after merely a month of absence, saw the great difference, and, knowing themselves deficient, earnestly signed the pledge.
Every pillar-box within an area of fifty square miles now had its fairy. Gnomes, overcrowding, had to get lodgment where they could. The favourite habitation of these democratic gentry was a discarded silk hat, of which there were many--for men had come to realize the ugliness and discomfort of the chimney monster, and had flung it out of fashion. Better ventilated, and with the nap rubbed the wrong way, they had become agreeable gnome-dwellings. There were long rows of them in Victoria Park, and they were generously dotted about Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Embankment Gardens.
The happiest chapter in the progress of June now began. It was nothing other than the open faith of man in the reality and truth of the fairies. Some of them, old people first, the youthful later, the children last, saw them; saw fairies flying along happy streets or proudly enthroned on the pillar-boxes, ruling with beneficence; saw gnomes dangling and balancing on the iron arms of lamp-posts, seated in rows on walls, sprawling among flower-pots on window-sills.
The discovery of this new vision had colossal results. It set the whole world writing paragraphs. The newspapers, avid for facts, boomed the revelation for all it was worth. German metaphysicians put on gold-rimmed spectacles and laboriously laid the foundations of voluminous tomes dedicated to the scientific analysis and philosophy of the new great influence which had come to advance mankind. It was the X rays and radium--advanced a long stage further.
Humanity generally woke up with a start to the better condition of things, and set itself even more vigorously than before to the remedying of wrongs and the removal of whatever rottenness had managed to survive.
Life became as an anthem with a jolly chorus. Croakers, and the pessimists whose idea of duty is to hinder and delay, were pleasantly pushed out of place, so that optimists, with vision and the will to do, might get to work.
Those months of spring--until the almond was in blossom, and the daisies began to bud--knew more eager preparation and the devising of true artistic plans for the betterment and adornment of London, its suburbs, and the other like places of England, than ever before.