Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

I thanked her very warmly for her solution, though it was but partial;

wondering much that in her, as in woman I met on my first entering the

forest, there should be such superiority to her apparent condition. Here

she left me to take some rest; though, indeed, I was too much agitated

to rest in any other way than by simply ceasing to move.

In half an hour, I heard a heavy step approach and enter the house. A

jolly voice, whose slight huskiness appeared to proceed from overmuch

laughter, called out "Betsy, the pigs' trough is quite empty, and that

is a pity. Let them swill, lass! They're of no use but to get fat. Ha!

ha! ha! Gluttony is not forbidden in their commandments. Ha! ha! ha!"

The very voice, kind and jovial, seemed to disrobe the room of the

strange look which all new places wear--to disenchant it out of the

realm of the ideal into that of the actual. It began to look as if I

had known every corner of it for twenty years; and when, soon after, the

dame came and fetched me to partake of their early supper, the grasp of

his great hand, and the harvest-moon of his benevolent face, which was

needed to light up the rotundity of the globe beneath it, produced such

a reaction in me, that, for a moment, I could hardly believe that there

was a Fairy Land; and that all I had passed through since I left home,

had not been the wandering dream of a diseased imagination, operating on

a too mobile frame, not merely causing me indeed to travel, but peopling

for me with vague phantoms the regions through which my actual steps

had led me. But the next moment my eye fell upon a little girl who was

sitting in the chimney-corner, with a little book open on her knee, from

which she had apparently just looked up to fix great inquiring eyes upon

me. I believed in Fairy Land again. She went on with her reading, as

soon as she saw that I observed her looking at me. I went near, and

peeping over her shoulder, saw that she was reading "The History of

Graciosa and Percinet."

"Very improving book, sir," remarked the old farmer, with a

good-humoured laugh. "We are in the very hottest corner of Fairy Land

here. Ha! ha! Stormy night, last night, sir."

"Was it, indeed?" I rejoined. "It was not so with me. A lovelier night I

never saw." "Indeed! Where were you last night?"