“And where is your garden, my child?”
“Oh, in the Summer-land. I always forget that you have never seen it. When I go there again, mamma, I will certainly take you too; for I love you with all my heart. I can never go without you.”
When she heard the evening-bells from the minster, she said, “Oh, they are like the joy-bells at home, only not so sweet. Nothing, here, is so sweet. Even my dear mamma is not so lovely as the lady who comes when I am asleep.”
Little One—they called her Little One for the want of a name—loved to prattle about the wonders of that mysterious fairy-land, which no one but herself had ever seen. Her mother would not check her, but let her tell her pretty visions of remembered rainbows, and palaces, and precious gems. She said,—
“The child has such a vivid fancy! It is not all of us who can see pictures when our eyes are shut.”
But the lord was not so well pleased; and once, when his daughter looked at a frozen stream and murmured, “We have the happiest rivers at home; they sing all day long, all the year, without freezing! Can I find that Summer-land again! Oh, I would creep all over the world to seek it,” he replied,—
“Little One, it is some cloud-city you are thinking of, some dream-land, or isle of Long Ago, which you will never see again. I beg you to forget these wild fancies.”
But still the child dreamed on. Once she heard the glad song of the Hyperboreans:—
“I come from a land in the sun-bright deep,
Where golden gardens glow;
Where the winds of the North, becalmed in sleep,
Their conch-shells never blow.”
She clapped her hands, murmuring to herself,—