"How strange!" gasped Pierot, when at last he found his voice. "The father always said that ours was the only hut till you got to the other side the forest."
"Perhaps this is the other side," suggested Pierotte.
An odd chuckling laugh followed this remark, and they became aware of an old woman sitting at the window of the cottage,—a comical old woman, with a stiff square cap on her head, sharp twinkling eyes, and a long hooked nose. As the children looked, she laughed again, and, extending her finger, beckoned them to come nearer.
Timidly they obeyed, setting down their big wood-basket at the gate. The old woman leaned over the window to await them, her hand on a square glass jar full of yellow liquid, in which floated what seemed to be a pickled serpent with his tail in three coils, and the tip in his mouth. Pierotte shuddered at the serpent, but Pierot was bolder.
"Did you want us, good madam?" he asked.
"Want you? No," replied the "good madam." "How should I want you? I saw you staring at my house as if your eyes would pop out of your heads, and I thought, perhaps, you wanted me."
"It was only—we were only—surprised," stammered Pierot. "Because we didn't know that there was a house here."
"There was none last night, and there won't be any to-morrow morning—at least—none for children to stare at," replied the old woman, coolly.
"What do you mean?" cried Pierot, astonished beyond measure. "How can a house be built in one night? And why won't it be here to-morrow?"
"Because to-morrow won't be Midsummer's Day—and to-day is," replied the old woman; "and a fairy-house is visible to mortal eyes at that time, and no other."