“And because the love of a country is one of the deepest loves you may feel, the band of her control was loosened, and the tears came welling to her eyes. Up they brimmed and over, in salty rush and follow, dimming her eyes, magnifying everything, speared for a moment on her eyelashes, then shimmering to their fall. And at last came the tear that held the disobedient Nixie. “Splish! it fell. And she was free. “If you could have seen how pretty she looked standing there about the height of a grass blade, wringing out her long wet hair. Every bit of moisture she wrung out of it, she was so glad to be quit of that tear. Then she raised her two arms above her in one delicious stretch, and if you had been the size of a mustard-seed perhaps you might have heard her laughing; then she grew a little, and grew and grew, till she was about the height of a bluebell, and as slender to see. “She stood looking at the splash on the window-sill that had been her prison so long, and then with three steps of her bare feet, she reached the jessamine that was growing by the window, and by this she swung herself to the ground. “Away she sped over the dew-drenched meadows till she came to the running brook, and with all her longing in her outstretched hands, she kneeled down by the crooked willows among all the comfry, and the loosestrife, and the yellow irises, and the reeds. “Then she slid in to the wide, cool stream.” CHAPTER XIII _But now her nose is thin, And it resteth on her chin Like a staff. And a crook is in her tack, And a melancholy crack In her laugh._ O. WENDEL HOLMES.