He put the last pearl carefully away with the others; and then he took the bag of feathers and emptied it over Agatha's head. As he did so he said some of the strange long words that Wise Men use.
And then——
Agatha was there no longer. There was nothing to be seen of her except a little heap of yellow curls, which the Wise Man kept to give to the next person who asked him for gold.
But out of the cave there flew a happy bird. It flew far, far up into the sky, singing with a beautiful voice. It flew higher up into the sky than any nightingale ever flew.
For the Wise Man had done more than he had promised. The bird's beautiful voice was not the voice of the nightingale, the Bird of Shadows; but the voice of the lark, the Sun-Bird, who is never sad.
THE SEA-FAIRY AND THE LAND-FAIRY, AND HOW THEY QUARRELLED
THE sea-fairy's name was Laughing Sapphire, and he lived in a nautilus-shell: the land-fairy was called Sweet-of-the-Mountain, and his home was a tuft of heather. One day Sweet-of-the-Mountain went for a stroll on the sea-shore, and there he met Laughing Sapphire, just at the edge of the ripples. It was then that the quarrel began.
"I am really sorry for you," said the sea-fairy. "It must be very unpleasant to live up on that cliff. It is so dangerous too. You might be blown down at any moment!"
"Ha-ha, how very amusing!" laughed the land-fairy. "Unpleasant, did you say? Dangerous? Not at all, not at all. Now, your life is something too horrible to think of. I am glad it is not my fate to wander for ever on the sea. And as for danger—well, every one knows that the sea is full of dangers."
"I never heard such nonsense," said Laughing Sapphire indignantly. "The sea is perfectly safe if you know how to manage your shell."