Old Annis smiled when the little girl told her what she had caught in the shrimping-net.
‘It was what I had expected,’ she said. ‘Now, dear little maid, you must get up with the larks to-morrow and come here, and you shall then see what you will see.’
Bessie Jane got out of bed the minute she awoke the next day, which was just as the little skybirds were beginning to sing; and when she was dressed she hurried off to Tamarisk Lane.
Early though it was, the Wise Woman was also up, and when she saw her little friend coming, she went and opened her door.
The first thing the child saw as she came into the cottage were two tiny ears—smaller even than a harvest-mouse’s ears—on the table, and near them two round eyeballs, with a sapphire spark in each of them.
As her glance rested on the wee eyes and ears, Old Annis called her to her side, and taking up the ears, she dropped them into the child’s ears; then she took up the eyes, and putting some Wee Folk’s glue on their back, she put them into Bessie Jane’s pretty brown ones, and told her to look round her cottage.
The child did so, and saw to her amazement that it was full of Small People, including little Brown Piskey-men. They were all amusing themselves in various ways: some were running about the sanded floor; some were looking into the depths of a Toby jug full of milk; and some tickling Old Annis’s large grey cat. The Piskeys were astride her fiddle-backed chairs and her settle, and winked at the sweet little maid whenever she turned her gaze their way, and they winked so funnily she could not have helped laughing to save her life. As she was looking at them, the Wise Woman told her if she wished to see the sea-fairies in Harlyn Bay she must go at once.
She did not at all want to go, for the Small People were most fascinating, she told the old woman, particularly the little brown winking Piskeys; but she went all the same.
As she walked down the lane to the bay, she looked through the tamarisk hedge into the common, and saw that somehow or other it looked different. There was a soft green light hanging over it, and where the sand was only the day before there was a multitude of most beautiful flowers of every colour and shade, the like of which she had never seen before. Amongst the flowers cows were feeding. The cows were ever so small, not bigger than rats. There were teeny tiny goats there, too, and dear little men in queer hats and coats looking after them. The cows and goats belonged to the Wee Folk, she supposed. It was all so delightfully different and odd, and she couldn’t think how she had never noticed all this on the common before, till she remembered she was seeing through a sea-fairy’s eyes.
As she climbed the cliffs overlooking the bay a sound of sweetest music stole upon her borrowed ears, and glancing to where the sound came, she saw that the edge of the low cliff was crowded with Small People, who were singing away like a choir of song-birds. Some of them were sitting on Piskey-stools,[3] some on the edge of the cliff, others were standing. In the background were a score or more of tiny musicians, with reeds, flutes, and other instruments of music in their hands. These last were quaintly dressed in poppy-coloured coats and speedwell-blue breeches, and on their dear little heads were blue three-cornered hats turned up with the same rich colour as their coats. The whole company of Wee Folk were delightful to look at as they were to listen to; and as for the tiny ladies of the party, they were, Bessie Jane told herself, little nosegays of wild-flowers, and if they had not been trilling and piping as she came upon them, she would have mistaken them for cliff-blossoms, so bright they looked in their lovely gowns of trefoil-gold and reds, thrift-pink, squill-blue, and all those exquisite colours that make the Cornish cliffs so beautiful in the late spring and early summer-time.