Once as we were entering a deep, dark wood, she cautioned me to walk very softly and to speak in a whisper in order that we might catch the Forest Folk at play, and as we trod a specially beautiful forest aisle she cried out, "I saw one, Poppie! Didn't you see that little shining thing?"
I could only say, "Yes, it must have been a fairy." I would not destroy her illusion.
She inhabited a world of ineffable beauty, a universe in which minute exquisite winged creatures flashed like flakes of fire, through dusky places. She heard their small faint voices in the whisper of the leaves, and every broad toadstool was to her a resting place for weary elfin messengers hurrying on some mission for their queen. Her own imaginings, like her favorite books, were all of magic wands, golden garments and crystal palaces. Sceptered kings, and jeweled princesses trailing robes of satin were the chief actors in her dreams.
I am aware that many educators consider such reading foolish and harmful, but I care nothing for wire-drawn pedagogic theories. That I did nothing to mar the mystical beauty of the world in which my daughter then dwelt, is my present satisfaction, and I shamelessly acknowledge that I experienced keen pangs of regret as her tender illusions, one after another faded into the chill white light of later day. Without actually deceiving her, I permitted her to believe that I too, heard the wondrous voices of Titania and her elves in convention behind the rose bush, or the whispers of gnomes hiding among the cornrows.
Good republican that I was, I listened without reproof to her adoring fealty to Kings and Queens. Her love of Knights and tournaments was openly fostered at my hand. "If she should die out of this, her glorious imaginary world, she shall die happy," was my thought, "and if she lives to look back upon it with a woman's eyes, she shall remember it as a shining world in which her Daddy was a rough but kindly councillor, a mortal of whom no fairy need have fear."
The circus was my daughter's royal tournament, an assemblage of all the kings and queens, knights and fairies of her story books. She hated the clowns but the parade of the warriors and their sovereign exalted her. The helmeted spearmen, the lithe charioteers, the hooded drivers sitting astride the heads of vast elephants were characters of the Arabian Nights, passing veritably before her eyes. The winged dancers of the spectacle came straight from the castle of Queen Mab, the pale acrobats were brothers to Hector and Achilles.
As she watched them pass she gripped my hand as if to keep touch with reality, her little heart swollen with almost intolerable delight. "It makes me shiver," she whispered, and I understood.
As the last horseman of the procession was passing, she asked faintly—"Will it come again, Poppie?"
"Yes, it will come once more," I replied, recalling my own sense of loss when the Grand Entry was over.
As the queen, haughty of glance, superb in her robe of silver once more neared us, indolently swaying to the movement of the elephant, who bore his housings of purple and gold with stately solemnity, my daughter's tiny body quivered with ecstasy and her beautiful eyes dilated with an intensity of admiration, of worship which made me sad as well as happy, and then just as the resplendent princess was passing for the last time, Mary Isabel rose in her place and waving a kiss to her liege lady cried out in tones of poignant love and despair, "Good-by, dear Queen!" and I, holding her tender palpitant figure in my arms, heard in that slender silver-sweet cry the lament of childhood, childhood whose dreams were passing never to return.