"I am afraid I have left it rather late," she said at last. "They are all rather too well-grown to stand moving. But I will try a few of the smallest. What luck have my chicks had? Any fairies, Jackie?"
Jackie lifted a flushed face from its inspection of a tiny hole in the trunk of a fir-tree.
"No fairies yet, mother; but I think one lives in here, only she won't come out while I am watching."
Mrs. Merrithew smiled sympathetically. She heartily agreed with the writer (though she could not remember who it was) who said: "I always expect to find something wonderful, unheard-of, in a wood."
"In olden days," she said, "people believed that there were beautiful wood-spirits, called dryads, who had their homes in trees. They were larger than most fairies, and yet they were a kind of fairy."
"Please tell more about them, mother," said Marjorie, coming up with her hands full of yellow, speckled adder's-tongue.
"I know very little more, I am sorry to say," their mother answered, laughing. "Like Jackie with his fairies, I have always hoped to see one, but never have as yet."
"Are they good things?" Jackie asked, "or would they frighten little boys?"
"Oh, my dear, they were always said to be kind and beautiful, and rather timid, more apt to be frightened themselves than to frighten any one else. But remember, dears, mother did not say there were such things, but only that people used to think so."
"Please tell us a story about one, mother," Jack pleaded.