"What are you two doing here all alone? Don't you know you'll catch your death o' cold sitting here so long?"
"Are there any marshmallows left?"
"No," said the little girl, answering the last question, "we don't care about marshmallows any way," and I really believe just then she thought she did not care about them, though usually she likes them almost as well as anybody.
THE MINSTREL KNIGHT
The little girl stayed at the seashore till the middle of the autumn. That is the way sensible people do, when they can, and I have worked much in vain if I have not shown by this time that this little girl is a sensible little person. The spring is very lovely, to be sure, and of course we all love it. I should be the last one to say anything against it. But to me the most beautiful time of the whole beautiful year is the early autumn. The heat and the work and the worry of the year are over, and the clear, rich, golden good of it all is left to be enjoyed. The flowers are not pink and pale blue any more; they are of deep, splendid yellow and red and purple. The golden-rod and the asters are lords of flowers, and the cardinal is their high-priest, while if you will have something that is delicate and modest, there is the fringed gentian, and that shows, too, how healthy and brave and free it is by keeping no company with dark shadows, and opening only when the bright sun shines full upon it.
But of the things that are best in the autumn, the best above all others is the sea. It has been lying quiet and restful all summer, and now it awakes and begins to move and to show the strength and the freedom of its glorious life. As you stand upon the shore and look at it, it draws itself away from you and away from the land as if it were done with it forever; then it pauses, and in a moment begins to come back. Up and up the beach it marches with a majestic will that nothing else in the world is like; as it comes it lifts itself higher and higher; then the wave leaps into the air and its crest is turned to emerald as the sunlight strikes through it for the pause of another instant, there is a roll, a mad plunge, the spray dashes high above your head, the foam floats and flies up the beach to your very feet, the hollow rumble of the water sounds fainter and farther along the sands, and the ocean draws itself back away from you and away from the land. Its colors are different, too. Before it had all sorts of fanciful hues and shades, pale green and blue, silver, violet, almost rose sometimes, the colors of summer dreams. Now the dreaming time is over. The green of the wave-crests is luminous, the white and the blue have the gleam of polished steel, the violet and the rose are turned to deep, rich purple. The sea is not cold, harsh, and cruel yet, but it is free, bold, and majestic.
All this I knew because I remembered it, not because I saw it, for I had been back in the city a long time. The fire was lighted again and I had sat before it often, thinking of the driftwood fire away down there, with the little girl sitting before it, seeing pictures in it for herself, perhaps, and listening to the low sound of the sea, coming up through the still evening air. But one night she came and sat with me again, and once more we both looked into the same fire. "I believe I can almost see pictures myself now," she said.
"Can you? And what do you see in the fire now?"
"Oh, I can see a prince and a princess—and a knight—and a lovely goddess, like the one that had the apples—and a cave, like the one where the dragon lived—"
"And don't you see the dragon himself? Where is he?"