“And now it but remains to find the fairy queen,” said Jack Frost to himself, as he stood again in the open, “yet I know not where she holds her court.”
Then he bethought him of the tiny packet inside the third egg, and rubbing some of the eye-salve upon his eyes, he at once became aware of the fairy queen and her retinue, assembled in a grove close at hand. Then Jack Frost went and knelt to the queen, and offering her the magic ring, begged for the king’s son in exchange.
“So, young sir, you would rob me of my bonny page?” said she, with one fair hand held out for the ring, and the other resting upon the curls of a beautiful seven-year-old boy at her side. But she smiled very graciously as she spoke, for she was rejoiced at the recovery of the ring.
So the changeling returned whence he came, and the little prince was restored to his parents. As for Jack Frost, the foundling, he sat him down among the fairies in the grove, and having eaten and drunk in their midst, was seen of his own kind no more.
CHAPTER XVIII
OF WHICH THE SCENE IS LAID IN A SICK-ROOM
No sooner had Philomène returned to the house than Nurse began scolding her for having gone out into the wet. “As if you couldn’t have waited till to-morrow to have a look at your garden,” she said impatiently, “and the air as raw this afternoon as it might be November.”
The next day Philomène was in bed with a bad chill, and was very far from well for several weeks, but she made a good little patient, swallowed her medicines without a grimace, and bravely hid her disappointment when Nurse refused to let her have Master Mustardseed in the room with her, on the ground that his loud singing would give her a headache.
“If I could only explain to her,” she thought sadly, “that he doesn’t speak nearly as loud as he sings.”
Philomène therefore had to do the best she could by herself. She crowned herself queen of her bed-kingdom to begin with; the sheets and blankets were her subjects, her Prime Minister was the quilt, and the pillows made up her body-guard under the leadership of their captain the bolster. The eider-down she raised to the rank of Prince Consort, because he was arrayed in royal satin, and being wadded and yielding, was not likely to stand in the way of any of his wife’s plans.
She also had the big globe out of the schoolroom placed on the chair by her bed, and proceeded to invent a geographical game worthy of a student of “The World and All About It.” “Lady World is the mother,” she said to herself, “and the continents are the governesses. I like Miss Europe best, and trust her most, because I know the most about her. The countries are head-nurses, and Mrs England is the headest of them all. Provinces and counties are under-nurses, and the towns are the children. Then I think mountains had better be coachmen and grooms and gardeners, and people of that sort, and the rivers can be maids, because they keep things clean, and gradually grow more important. The Isis only starts as a scullery-maid, but by the time it has got to London it is an upper house-maid, and is called the Thames. I think the Atlantic is to be the big playground for the children, and the Indian Ocean is Lady World’s drawing-room, because it has coral reefs and flying fish and phosphorus and exciting things in it, like the curios in Godmother’s cabinets. The little seas like the Caspian and the White Sea are rather dull, so they can be used as store-rooms, and the five great lakes in North America are turned into sick-rooms when any of the towns get ill. Let me see, the Pacific had better be the kitchen, because there are so many islands in it which will do as cooks. The Arctic ocean is the bathroom, so that the children may get used to cold baths, and the Antarctic can be the lumber-room, because nobody goes there much.”