And Corette's father and mother grieved. They wanted their daughter to be as she was before. They said that Sweet Marjoram Day was very near, but that they could not look forward to it with pleasure. Corette might go out to the fields, but she could only sit upon some high place, as the fairies used to sit. She could not help in the gathering. She could not even be with the babies; they would roll on her and crush her. So they mourned.
It was now the night before the great holiday. Sweet Marjoram Eve had not been a very gay time, and the people did not expect to have much fun the next day. How could they if the fairy sisters did not come? Corette felt badly, for she had never told that the sisters had been condensed, and the Condensed Pirate, who had insisted on her secrecy, felt worse. That night he lay in his great bed, really afraid to go to sleep on account of rats and mice.
He was so extremely wakeful that he lay and thought, and thought, and thought for a long time, and then he got up and dressed and went out.
It was a beautiful moonlight night, and he made his way directly to Corette's house. There, by means of a vine, he climbed up to her window, and gently called her. She was not sleeping well, and she soon heard him and came to the window.
He then asked her to bring him two spools of fine thread.
Without asking any questions, she went for the thread, and very soon made her appearance at the window with one spool in her arms, and then she went back for another.
"Now, then," said the Condensed Pirate, when he had thrown the spools down to the ground, "will you dress yourself and wait here at the window until I come and call you?"
Corette promised, for she thought he had some good plan in his head, and he hurried down the vine, took up a spool under each arm, and bent his way to the church. This building had a high steeple which overlooked the whole country. He left one of his spools outside, and then, easily creeping with the other under one of the great doors, he carried it with infinite pains and labor up into the belfry.
There he tied it on his back, and, getting out of a window, began to climb up the outside of the steeple.
