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Updated: May 18, 2025
"Horseshoes, I suppose he means," I said. "I'll try." "Wait till we're out of the way," said Dart, and was off. In a moment more I heard not what I was rather expecting, a horn of Elf-land, but two strokes on the bell. I saw the figures of the boys shoot up and away to left and right, leaving the bat-ball clear, and the bats shrieked aloud, I dare say in triumph at the enemy's retreat.
Who can forget the soft enchantment of this Buddhist atmosphere? the deep music of the great bells? the green peace of gardens haunted by fearless things, doves that flutter down at call, fishes rising to be fed? ... Despite our incapacity to enter into the soul-life of this ancient East, despite the certainty that one might as well hope to remount the River of Time and share the vanished existence of some old Greek city, as to share the thoughts and the emotions of Old Japan, we find ourselves bewitched forever by the vision, like those wanderers of folk-tale who rashly visited Elf-land.
"I have never got rid of it from childhood the fear of this magic shop. The grocer is rich, he is romantic, he is poetical in the truest sense, but he is not no, he is not supernatural. But the chemist! All the other shops stand in Notting Hill, but this stands in Elf-land. Look at those great burning bowls of colour. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets.
The old man fumbled in his pocket, from which he drew a shagreen spectacle-case, as substantial looking as himself, and, planting the spectacles firmly on his heavy nose, he held out his hand to Jan. "There," said he, "take me where ye will. To bonnie Elf-land, if that's your road, where withered leaves are gold." Jan ran round willingly to take the hand of his new friend.
Where am I?" asked Anne, drawing herself up with the native dignity that she felt to be her defence. "In Elf-land," he said, with a smile, as he heaped her plate. "Speak in earnest," she entreated. "I cannot eat till I understand. It is no time for trifling! Life and death hang on my reaching London! If you saved me from those men, let me go free." "No one can move at present," he said.
That is the road to bonnie Elf-land, Where thou and I this night maun gae." "Where is it?" said Jan, earnestly. "Is't a town?" The old man laughed. "I'm thinking it would be well to let that path be, in your company. We'd hardly get out under a year and a day." "I'd go with you," said Jan, confidently. Many an expedition had he undertaken on his own responsibility, and why not this?
As the microscope reveals to our wondering sight the rich meshes of creation, so the microphone can interpret to our ears the jarr of molecular vibrations for ever going on around us, perchance the clash of atoms as they shape themselves into crystals, the murmurous ripple of the sap in trees, which Humboldt fancied to make a continuous music in the ears of the tiniest insects, the fall of pollen dust on flowers and grasses, the stealthy creeping of a spider upon his silken web, and even the piping of a pair of love-sick butterflies, or the trumpeting of a bellicose gnat, like the 'horns of elf-land faintly blowing.
Here indeed was Elf-land, the strange, the beautiful, the grotesque, the very mysterious, totally unlike aught of strange and attractive ever beheld elsewhere. It was not a world of the nineteenth century after Christ, but a world of many centuries before Christ: yet this fact the wonder of wonders remained unrecognized; and it remains unrecognized by most people even to this day.
Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with the sweetness of it. "Go ahead!" he whispered. "Do that all you want to.
The answer was to raise her still gloved hand with substantial fingers to a pair of lips. "Then then he is safe! Thank God!" she murmured, and shut her eyes again, dizzy and overcome, unable even to analyse her conviction that all would be well, and that in some manner he had come to her rescue. "Where am I?" she murmured dreamily. "In Elf-land?" "Yes; come to be Queen of it."
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