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And in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies. The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities. And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful exotics, Japanese golden evergreens one for 1879 and one for 1880.
Tales of the forests and legends of the Hartz Mountains, of lonely places haunted by nixies and wood maidens, fairy shapes with streaming hair and vaporous robes, seeing which a man would become for ever after mad with longing, and desire no mortal woman.
In savage systems the details on this point are hardly ever recorded or obtainable; but the beliefs involved in later folk-lore make it probable that this latter stage of the construction of creeds is passed through in savage life. The water maidens of Greek mythology and the Germanic nixies and water kelpies are developed forms of spirits.
Forests were enchanted places, and trolls dwelt in the mountains. There was no question about that; most people never took time to see them, that was all. Now as for him, he had actually beheld naiads and dryads, nixies and pixies, at play at least he had practically been upon the point of seeing them.
"Now who would have thought that Hermann was so romantic!" they said. "And he has the fattest pigs and the biggest casks of wine in the village!" Songs were proposed; everyone joined in; the voices of the nixies were heard above all, clear and beautiful as a bell.
"Was ever such a vision of loveliness?" cried the enraptured lady: "she must be my own little daughter, eat of my bread, and sleep upon my bosom." Then, kneeling, she sang, "Fair little nixies, that dwell near the water, Give me the winged one to be my own daughter." The dance ceased.
"You laugh like a cucumber." "Cucumbers neither laugh nor cry." "If they did laugh they would laugh like you. I shall go along to the lake. And while I search for the beautiful waters in which the nixies live you shall stay alone at home like a good girl. I will leave you my needle-work and my doll. Take care of them, George, take good care of them."
As King Loc thrust his head into the opening through which daylight poured, he saw George of Blanchelande in his glass dungeon where he was lamenting grievously as he thought of Honey-Bee and of earth. For King Loc had undertaken this subterranean journey only to deliver the captive of the nixies.
But why hasn't she got a head?" "Probably because she has lost it." Without saying if this explanation was satisfactory, Honey-Bee gazed at the horizon. "Little brother, little brother, just see what sparkles by the side of the blue mountains? It is the lake." "It is the lake." They then remembered what the Duchess had told them of these beautiful and dangerous waters where the nixies dwell.
It is larger than it seems at first sight; through it meanders the river, coiling and uncoiling, hidden here and there by jungle growths, and seeking final outlet through a cleft in the wall not unlike a crack in the side of a painted bowl. The place seems to have been fashioned as a dwelling for dryads and hamadryads, for nixies and pixies, and all the fabled spirits of forest and stream.
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