Minnie; or, The Little Woman: A Fairy Story

by C. S. Guild

Then all the changing colors of the water, and the pretty wreaths of foam, delighted her. She built a house, for herself, of such white pebbles and shells that it looked like a little marble palace. And the tables and seats inside, and the bed, were all beautiful mother-of-pearl.

But a storm came one day, and washed away her house, and dashed the waves so high upon the beach, that Minnie fled for her life.

It happened a spruce-tree stood not far from the shore; so she scrambled up into its branches, both to be sheltered from, and to watch, the storm.

It was awful to see the great waves rise and beat against the beach, as if they meant to wash the whole world away, and to hear the grating of the stones they clashed together, and see the great mats of seaweed they tore from the rocks, and the shells they swept out of their crevices, and tossed on the shore in heaps.

Minnie at home.

And the water kept rising, and rising, till it covered the beach, and came nearer and nearer, until it reached the roots of the very tree into which Minnie had climbed. It had been hard enough to bear the beating of the branches in the wind, but now must she be drowned, so far from her home, and no one ever dream what had become of her?

Minnie screamed with fright, and then, through the storm, she seemed to hear a low song, such as her mother used to sing, and, instead of the rough spruce branches, it seemed as if her mother's arms were about her now.

She opened her eyes in wonder. Could it be that the soft hand she had missed so long was stroking her curls once more? that the dear voice she had never thought to hear again was singing soft lullabies over her? that Allie was looking in her face, and Frank was holding her pale hand in his?

Yes, and, stranger still, her mother and Franky declared that they had been with her all the while. On that first day of my story, when the squirrel came,--it seemed years ago to Minnie, now,--she had fallen from the fence, and bruised her head, and had been sick with a fever ever since, and they thought she must have dreamed these marvellous things.