'Celestial being!' he exclaimed rapturously. 'I again behold thee. Bright inmate! How did it run?'
'Bother your verses!' cried the boy with utter contempt. 'Shy at it, you duffer! Oh, what a Butterfly! Get her into the teapot. Blockhead!'
This last disdainfully to himself, for he had hurled the ancient and valuable teapot at Mab, who was flying to a higher branch, and the teapot had missed.
'Rash boy!' cried the Palæonto-theologist, shaking him angrily, 'you have broken my grandfather's teapot.'
'Run for the butterfly-net,' returned the boy unabashed. 'By George, I'll give you the jolliest licking!'
'Hi, there she goes! Seize her!' he shouted distractedly, and the unlucky Palæonto-theologist rushed after a butterfly-net, while Queen Mab, in unutterable indignation, rose slowly into the air, followed by the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened his beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy but scientific delight, the word—
'Reaction!'
But Queen Mab, after this crowning insult, was fain to depart from Britain and renounce the higher civilisation. In the Councils of the New Democracy she had no place. Church and State abjured her: the rising generation needed no fairies, but was content with football and cricket, 'Treasure Island,' and the Latin Grammar. Education, Philosophy, and the Philistines had made of the island she once loved well a wilderness wherein no fairy might henceforth furl its wings.
She said 'good-bye' to the Owl, who shed one tear at parting, and to all the loyal birds, and went back to Samoa. But alas! Samoa, like Great Britain, was no longer any place for her. It was annexed: it was evangelised. The natives of it were going to church; they were going to Sunday School; they were going to heaven. They were sending their children to be educated at English colleges: they were translating Tennyson and Wesley's sermons, and learning the catechism, and reading the Testament in the original Greek, and wearing high-crowned hats and paper collars. There was no end of the things they were doing, and they had no time for fairies.
Queen Mab summoned her Court together in despair, and left for one of the Admiralty Islands. There, till the civilisation that dogs the steps of the old folk-lore has driven her thence—with constitutions, and microscopes, and a higher Pantheism that leaves the older Pantheism in the lurch, and other advantages of the nineteenth century—she is secure. We trust that she is also happy, and that the shadow of the approaching hour when she will be ultimately reduced by scientific theologians to a symbol of some deeper verity, the conception of men whose understandings could not cope, like ours, with abstract truth, is not cast heavily upon her path. For she knows well, now, that her day is over, that she is too tangible by far for a higher Pantheism, and that only among the heathen, in some obscure corner of Oceania, she is still permitted to linger on, till that lagging island too receives its chrism of intellect, and is caught up into the van of time.