The flowers seem a sort of
houses for them, or outer bodies, which they can put on or off
when they please. Just as you could form some idea of the nature
of a man from the kind of house he built, if he followed his own
taste, so you could, without seeing the fairies, tell what any
one of them is like, by looking at the flower till you feel that
you understand it. For just what the flower says to you, would
the face and form of the fairy say; only so much more plainly as
a face and human figure can express more than a flower. For the
house or the clothes, though like the inhabitant or the wearer,
cannot be wrought into an equal power of utterance. Yet you
would see a strange resemblance, almost oneness, between the
flower and the fairy, which you could not describe, but which
described itself to you. Whether all the flowers have fairies, I
cannot determine, any more than I can be sure whether all men and
women have souls.
The woman and I continued the conversation for a few minutes
longer. I was much interested by the information she gave me,
and astonished at the language in which she was able to convey
it. It seemed that intercourse with the fairies was no bad
education in itself. But now the daughter returned with the
news, that the Ash had just gone away in a south-westerly
direction; and, as my course seemed to lie eastward, she hoped I
should be in no danger of meeting him if I departed at once.
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