“Tell me what you are doing,” said Tom. “How do you make it all glow like that?”
“The fairies’ secret, little man. Good-bye! Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” answered Tom. “Thank you for the glimpse.”
He had scarcely finished speaking when he felt himself being borne along at an awful pace; the water was rushing to meet the sea. They met, and Tom felt himself hurled down ever so far below the surface of the water, then tossed up again. He had gone down as a fish, but he came up as a boy, and his wet clothes kept him from swimming very easily. Just as he thought he would not have strength to swim much further, he heard a voice say—“There is a boy sinking, pull over and take him in the boat.”
In a few minutes he was safe among a boatload of picnickers who had driven from the Mount to Dingley Dell, the beautiful place where Adam Lindsay Gordon lived for many years.
“Why, it is young Tom Jones,” cried one of the rowers. “Did you walk all the way here from your uncle’s place in the Mount? It is a good nineteen miles.”
“No,” answered truthful Tom. “I swam from the Blue Lake.”
But no one would listen to his tale of adventures. They hurried him to “Adam Lindsay Gordon’s” Cottage, wrapped him in shawls, and soon drove away with him to a doctor, because, they said, he was raving. In vain Tom pointed to a nasty jagged cut in his lip, and told them he had been a fish for a time. They would not listen, and even to this day, if he begins to tell his wondrous adventures, they smile so broadly that Tom gives up the attempt to make them know the truth about the river theory.
Tom knows what he knows, however, and he is certain he has not seen the last of the fairies, but that in the wattle blossom season they will allow him to see them among the golden blossoms on the river banks.
