Jack felt very tired indeed—as much tired as if he had really been out all day on the river, and gliding under the coils of the Craken. He however rose up, when the apple-woman called him, and drank his tea, and had some fairy bread with it, which refreshed him very much.
After tea he measured Mopsa again, and found that she had grown up to a higher button. She looked much wiser too, and when he said she must be taught to read she made no objection, so he arranged daisies and buttercups into the forms of the letters, and she learnt nearly all of them that one evening, while crowds of the one-foot-one fairies looked on, hanging from the boughs and sitting in the grass, and shouting out the names of the letters as Mopsa said them. They were very polite to Jack, for they gathered all these flowers for him, and emptied them from their little caps at his feet as fast as he wanted them.
“While crowds of the one-foot-one fairies looked on, hanging from the boughs.”
CHAPTER XI
GOOD MORNING, SISTER
“Sweet is childhood—childhood’s over,
Kiss and part.
Sweet is youth; but youth’s a rover—
So’s my heart.