"Come! we have no time to lose."
"It must remain a secret," was the reply. "Our discourse yesterday evening was so thoughtful, so sad, I could not sleep. I arose hours before you this morning, ere daylight streaked the sky. Dear Sisters, how shocked you will be to hear I wept; but now I have determined. If my gift succeed I will tell you all about it, or you shall guess it yourselves; for I now propose that our Fairy Gifts this year shall be a sort of experiment on human happiness. Let us from time to time visit in company our young charges, and let the result—that is, which of our Gifts is proved to confer the greatest amount of happiness, be written in the archives of our kingdom for the future benefit of the mortal race."
A murmur of approbation rose, sweet as the vibration of a harp-chord through the assembly.
There was no time for enquiry about the other gifts: the travelling Fairies arose and beat their gauzy wings upon the western breeze. A melodious rushing was just audible; the distant murmurs of the earthly sea the most resemble that sweet dream of sound. In a few moments the departing sisters became invisible, and those who remained returned to float by the sea shore, or make sweet music in the bowers of their enchanted land.
Time is a very odd sort of thing, dear readers. We neither know whence it comes nor whither it goes;—nay we know nothing about it in fact except that there is one little moment of it called the present, which we have as it were in our hands to make use of—but beyond this we can give no account of, even that little moment. It is ours to use, but not to understand. There is one thing in the world, however, quite as wonderful, and quite as common, and that is, the Wind. Did it never strike you how strange it was that the strongest thing in the world should be invisible? The nice breezes we feel in summer and the roughest blasts we feel in winter in England are not so extremely strong you will say: but I am speaking, besides these, of the winds called hurricanes that arise in the West Indian Islands, and in other places in the world. These dreadful hurricanes have at times done as much mischief as earthquakes and lightning. They tear down the strongest trees, overthrow the firmest houses and spread ruin and desolation around, and yet this terrible power, so tremendous, and against which the cleverest contrivances can provide no defence, is as invisible as the great Maker of Heaven and Earth. How unbelieving many people would look if you told them of a dreadful creature that was coming to the world, which could be heard to roar, be felt to knock down every thing in its path—men, women and children, houses, churches, towers, castles, cities, and trees the most firmly rooted—and yet which you could never catch the faintest glimpse of, for it was always invisible, even when it roared the loudest! As invisible then, as when in its mildest moods, it, as it were, purred softly over the country like a cat. How the good people would laugh, and tell you you were very silly to believe in such a thing. Yet I think this is not at all an incorrect description of the great invisible Power WIND. Now the lesson we may learn from this is to be humble-minded; for since we live in the constant presence of a Power we cannot see, we ought to feel it is equally possible other Powers may exist of which our other senses cannot take cognizance. There is an old proverb—"Seeing is believing"—but you perceive, dear readers, we are forced to believe in the wind though we never see him at all.
To return to Time who is travelling fast on while I am rambling after the wind, he has puzzled the artists a good deal I should say, for with all their skill at representation they have never hit upon any better idea of him than an old Man with wings. An old man with wings! Can you fancy anything so unnatural! One can quite understand beautiful young Angels with wings. Youth and power and swiftness belong to them. Also Fairies with wings are quite comprehensible creatures; for one fancies them so light and airy and transparent, living upon honey dew and ambrosia, that wings wherewith to fly seem their natural appendages. But the decrepitude of old age and the wings of youth and power are a strange mixture:—a bald head, and a Fairy's swiftness!—how ridiculous it seems, and so I think I may well say Time is a very odd sort of thing.
Among those who have to deal with Time, few are more puzzled how to manage him than we story-tellers. In my first chapter, for instance, I gave you a half-hour's conversation among some Fairies, but I think you would be very angry with me were I to give you as exactly every half-hour that passed over the heads of the little girls with Fairy Godmothers, till they grew up. How you would scold, dear little readers, if I were to enter into a particular description of each child's Nurse, and tell whether Miss Aurora, Miss Julia, Miss Hermione, &c. &c. &c. were brought up on baked flour, groat-gruel, rusks, tops and bottoms, or revalenta food! Whether they took more castor-oil, or rhubarb and magnesia; whether they squalled on those occasions or were very good. When they cut their teeth and how, together with all the &c. and ups and downs of Nursery life which large families, such as you and I belong to, go through daily.
Well then, suppose I altogether pass over a period of ten years, and enter into no minute particulars respecting that portion of Time. You must know that the Fairies had agreed that all the children should have the same (and rather a large) amount of intellect, or what you would call cleverness: that is to say, they were all equally capable of learning anything they chose to learn: also they had all fair health, plenty to eat and drink, and all the so called "necessary" comforts of life.
Now then to our story.