“But, John,” said Martha Mary, very much surprised, “the trees are alive.”
“They can’t talk.”
“They could, once,” said Flip. “And they still do talk in their own language, but of course you cannot understand them.”
“Can Father?” asked Edward Lee.
“I don’t think so,” answered Father.
“Can you, Flip?”
“No, but I know what they mean to say. Listen, now, and I will try to finish the story before anyone interrupts again. Elizabeth, stop sticking things in Hermit’s ear! Now—where was I?”
“You hadn’t started,” said Martha Mary.
“All right; then I’ll start with once, years and years ago. It was in a large forest, way up in the mountains, where there are only wild things and no men. The trees grow very tall and straight there; the branches are heavy and the trunks all covered with grey moss, and everything else is green. The forest, many years ago, was ruled by a lovely princess. Her name was Shade of the Mountain Lake and she was a large, lovely, blue crane. The trees just called her ‘Princess,’ because that was easy to say when the wind hummed in the branches, and ‘Shade of the Mountain Lake’ was much too long. Princess ruled her tree land for many years and the wood-folk were glad that they had chosen her, because she was so wise and graceful and lovely. You see, her soft breast feathers were colored with the blue of the sky of a Spring morning, and the grey of her slender neck was taken from the shaded spots near an old mountain. The green of her eyes once belonged to two splendid emeralds, and when the emeralds lost their color they became priceless diamonds. So how could Princess help but be beautiful?
“She was very proud of her kingdom; of the tall green trees and the blue-green lake and the very blue sky. All day she would fly over the hills, smiling on her people, sailing here and there, down and up, sometimes almost to the sun. One day, when she was very high in the Heavens, she saw, way off across the valley, a spot of red. That was a color that was not known in the mountains, so she flew with the wind, out across her valley and another valley until she came to a land where men lived. And there, what do you think she saw? Fields and fields and fields of the loveliest wild flowers, all golden and purple and pink, and gardens with red, red roses, and sweet-smelling lilacs climbing over the stone walls, and soft-colored fruit blossoms—there were more flowers than days in a hundred years. All afternoon she flew over the gardens, smelling the perfumes and always finding something new to surprise her. When night came she flew back to her kingdom in the mountains. But she was very sad, for she had thought her land the loveliest in the world and now she knew that it had none of the wonderful flowers that grew in the man’s world. All night she grieved and in the morning called her council to her—a branch of a pine and a branch of a redwood and a branch of the single oak that grew at the foot of the mountain. She told them how she had spent the day and how very, very much she wished her land to have all the colors and not only the green in Spring and the brown in Autumn. Then the branch of the single oak spoke and said: