Belgian Fairy Tales

by William Elliot Griffis

Coming suddenly upon a company of kabouters, these rude fellows at once seized her, crying out:

“Now we’ve got you. We’ve long wanted to catch one of the upper world fairies, for despising us sooty folk and making us work so hard for them. We have served your kind long enough. Now you shall do our will.”

So they tied around her waist one of their blacksmith’s leather aprons and stuck her pretty feet in old wooden shoes. Next, putting a pair of tongs into her hands, they bade her beat an iron bar, drawn red hot from the forge fire. Then, standing in front of the anvil, she had to beat the bar out flat. The kabouter, who was set to watch her and keep her busy, was one of the ugliest of their number. He had a cruel leer in his eye, and gloated over her, while she [[60]]toiled wearily. He scolded and even beat her, when she almost fainted under the hard tasks, to which she was so suddenly put and to which she was wholly unused.

Yet this earth fairy was very wise, while she was among the kabouters, and gradually she learned many of their secrets. One of these was the way these elves procured their iron; which was from the particles in the blood of the millions of men slain, on the soil of Belgium, ever since human beings came on the earth, and which makes blood so red. Here, the rival and hostile races had met on the thousand battle fields, known and unknown to human history. These were more numerous than spots on a leopard or stripes on a zebra. Torrents of blood had been poured out, and again and again the soil had been reddened, and the turf made to look dark with the stains. Sometimes, even rills and rivers ran red.

But the kindly rain from Heaven had made the human life-stream soak into the soil, and nature soon came with her sweet mantle of flowers to heal, and to reconcile, and make men forget. So to the new generation of boys and girls, each war, as it came and went, made only one more story to tell around the fireside on winter nights; for in summer with play and work, and dance and song they thought only of what [[61]]was just before them. Not for the young to look back over the past, except to hear about the fairies!

So, one generation after another, of human beings, forgot what had happened in former years and ages. Moreover, all the red rills, that had flowed from the veins of the wounded and dying, fed the earth and made it more fertile. Even their flesh and bones soon mingled with the soil and their elements reappeared in grain and trees, plants and flowers. Only the iron atoms of the blood of the soldiers remained in the ground. From the time when men fought with stone axes and arrows, to the days we can remember, when they used poison gas and dropped bombs from the sky, men fed the earth with their bodies and blood and left widows and orphans at home.

By the aid of their secret powers, the kabouters had collected these iron particles, that were once floating in human veins and arteries, and they made them into their tools, such as hammers, tongs, anvils, chains, locks, keys, and what not. They also possessed the secrets of the colors, that enter into the clays, flowers, stones, dyes for garments and whatever has tint or hue. The kabouters knew that, underneath all colors, of any sort or kind, there must be a metal, which, with other elements, becomes the [[62]]basis of all dyes, paints, and tints in or on anything solid or liquid.

Almost all the wonders of chemistry were known to these elves, and often, in talking to each other, they declared that everything, which the human artist laid on canvas, or with which he tinted his wall, or house, was caused by some chemical change in metals.

One of the most wonderful of their secrets was the transformation of iron into rouge, which the girls and women put on their cheeks, in order to imitate the lovely rose tints, with which nature paints the faces of her children. Yet whereas, in health and vigor, the color comes to the human face from within, foolish folks put it on from without. Indeed, in some countries, the forefinger and finger nail of the maidens which, at the tips, is usually red, is named “the rouge finger,” because most used for this purpose by the girls who wear out the carpet in front of their looking glasses.

Now it was an old kabouter, that was kind to the fairy from the upper earth, who told her the secret of the splendid hue of the red petals of the poppy.