One bold fairy looked defiance and spoke out loud in the meeting:
“I’m not afraid of these Frost Giants, from the North Pole. They are nothing but big, boasting bullies. Let our Fairy Queen change [[147]]me into a flower, and clothe me warm enough, and I’ll defy even the Frost King to hurt me.”
“Bravo, bravo!” cried all the fairies in chorus.
“But how could you stay all the time up there, with no living thing near you, and all alone? You will have no neighbors, except the rocks and crags, and even they will be all bare, and swept by the fierce winds. Can you stand that?” asked an old fairy, doubtingly.
“Yes, if for nothing else, than to show that we fairies are not afraid of the Frost Giants, I should be willing to live alone. Besides, our fairy queen will see that, by and bye, there will be others like me, and then I shall have company. The more of us, the merrier, I am sure. In a few thousand years, we’ll make an army and a victorious one, too.”
Seeing this brave one, of her company, so ready and willing, the Queen of the Fairies put on her thinking cap. She spent a whole night in planning how to turn this volunteer fairy into a flower. Then she would bundle her up in furs, and dress her so warmly, that even the biggest and coldest of the Frost Giants could not kill her with his icy breath.
And this was the way this volunteer, from the fairy ranks, was clothed and made ready to fight, in the long war with cold and storm, so that for ages, this little thing has been able to live far [[148]]up on the mountain heights and, all the time, to smile and be joyful, and laugh, in the face of the Frost Giants. In fact, so happy is she, among the rock crags and sunshiny crannies, and so amused at herself, in looking down over the terrible precipices, to the rocks, thousands of feet below, that she would not exchange places or climates, with even the cloves and nutmegs; no, not even with the tea roses and coffee blossoms in the Spice Islands of the southern seas.
Now it is customary in all happy families, when father and mother are expecting the cradle soon to be filled, to choose a name for the baby, and to have its clothes ready. This is done, so that the poor little thing, on coming into the world, will not get a chill, or sneeze, or have a cough, and die. Moreover, if it have a name, no one will mistake one baby for another, unless they arrive as twins, when some mark, such as a blue ribbon for a boy, and a pink one for a girl, is necessary.
So the old fairies put their heads together, to find a proper name for the new fairy flower-baby, that was to live among the cold mountain tops and refuse to be frightened, or frozen, or be driven down lower, or to be cuddled up in meadows, near men’s houses, where it was warm.
“What say you?” asked the Queen, of the wisest of the fairies, who was considered a sort of [[149]]sage or prophet, and who had a wonderfully long head. “What name do you give?”