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It hardly seems real it is too green, too perfect, to be believed; and one thinks of some fairy drop-scene, painted by cunning-fingered elves and sprites, who might have a wee folk's way of mixing roses and rainbows, dew-drenched greens and sun-warmed yellows; showing the picture to you first all burnished, glittering and radiant, then 'veiled in mist and diamonded with showers. We climb, climb, up, up, into the heart of the leafy loveliness; peering down into dewy dingles, stopping now and again to watch one of the countless streams as it tinkles and gurgles down an emerald ravine to join the lakes.
He grew up to be the great missionary, whose name in Friesland is, even today, after a thousand years, a household word. He it was who drove out bad fairies, vile enchanters, wicked spirits and terrible diseases. Best of all, he banished "eye-bite," which was the name the people gave to witchcraft. Luid-i-ger, also, made it hard for the naughty elves and sprites that delude men.
Anon, as in a varied dance, the skipping, mincing step is followed by a gentle swaying; or the figures all run together down the line to start the first dance again, or the divided groups have different motions, or one shouts a sudden answer to the other. And in the midst is a strange concert of low dancing strings with highest tones of harp, strange mating of flitting sprites.
The squaw gave a loud and plaintive yell, dashed the torch to the earth, and buried everything in darkness. The whole shuddering group of spectators glided from the lodge like troubled sprites; and Duncan thought that he and the yet throbbing body of the victim of an Indian judgment had now become its only tenants.
How good it was to be alive, to be free! The sunshine had never been so golden, she thought, nor danced so among the branches nor shook out such dainty sprites. How they skipped over the turf, now hold of hands, now singly, now running away and disappearing, others coming in their places! "The very woods are alive," she declared in glee.
Our trees may be wrecked by an avalanche, our garden plot may be obliterated by a land slip; the stone walls we build up in defiance of the snow are always pulled down by mountain sprites. Our agriculture is precarious, and every carrot is bought by the sweat of our brow. The struggle keeps pace with our love there is a tenfold sweetness in the fruit we reap.
Sometimes it seemed as if the sprites were the children of the flowers that die in blooming; and sometimes as if they came in a flock with the birds from the south; and sometimes as if they rose one by one from the roots of the trees in the deep forest, or from the waves of the sea when the moon lay upon them; and sometimes as if they appeared suddenly in the streets of the city after the people had passed by and the houses had gone to sleep.
In the first place, goddess succubus, Astarte provided the ring, which was of red gold enriched with a diamond, and placed it on the finger of her lover; in the second place, transcendental gestation, celestial or otherwise, fulfils the mystery of generation with exceeding despatch, for Astarte was delivered of an infant on the eleventh day independently of medical assistance, whereupon she demanded the return of the nuptial ring, and vanished with tent and sprites astride of the crescent couch.
She chides them for their duplicity, then extols them for their prankish playfulness. She makes them her companions, and they laugh in chorus. If she knows of sprites, and gnomes, and nymphs, and fairies, she finds them all dancing in glee at her feet in the form of rippling wavelets.
To them the world was a sort of enchanted ground, peopled with sprites and goblins; the quaint notions with which we now amuse our children in fairy tales represent a style of thinking which once was current among grown men and women, and which is still current wherever men remain in a savage condition.
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