Under a spring moon the nocturnal moor was all alive and awake. The pixies were busy measuring new fairy rings for the coming season; the elves—those “whose little eyes glow, like sparks of fire”—were entertaining the brownies; the Jacky-Toads, having danced the “Wildfire Gallop,” sat and rested, and talked politics. Then it happened that their missing colleague formed matter for discussion, and an aged Jacky-Toad, by tacit understanding father of the company, gave it as his opinion that the wanderer had lost himself in fresh running water, which is, of course, death to Ignes Fatui all the world over.
“He was a born fule, if you remember,” he concluded.
At the same moment a blue light flickered like a shooting-star above their heads, and, with the sound of a small bird alighting, the missing member of that community returned to his friends. Their welcome was, of course, hearty as need be, and from an attitude of absolute indifference one and all assumed the manner of affection, friendship and regard. Now the new-come Jacky-Toad, though his knowledge had appeared but scanty in the presence of his fair mistress, found, after leaving her and upon escaping the radius of her exceeding great erudition, that his own acquirements assumed a more important shape. A little knowledge may go far thus brought into a region where, until its arrival, there is none. The Jacky-Toad returned therefore with a sufficiently high estimate of his intellectual stores.
“Well, dear souls,” he said, “here I be again, an’ what I’ve seed and larned you’ll never credit, not if I talks to ’e for a month o’ Sundays.”
The father of the flock, fearing for a position which he merely held by courtesy and through his own natural force of character, now set himself to discount the adventurer’s information.
“You be the monkey as have seen the world—you be,” he said; “and what do ’e make o’t?”
“A terrible coorious world, and as for Lunnon—well, ’tis somethin’ amazin’ to be sure. An’ what wi’ geography, an’ nat’ral sciences, an’ poetry, an’ sich-like wonnerful branches o’ larnin’, my head’s full.”
They buzzed admiration, except the venerable Jacky-Toad.
“Let’s hear what you do know,” he suggested.
“Well, fust you must be told as we’m all made o’ gas—the whole boilin’ of us. We’m no more’n just a whiff of phosphuretted hydrogen!”