"What I like about the French," said Harold, remembering a summer spent in France, "is the big red breeches on the soldiers: then you've got the gore on you all the time, whether you're fighting or not." Elizabeth's mild beam of humor saw a chance to shine:-- "Oh, but, Harold," she exclaimed, "they _are_ so dangerous! You know the towns were full of soldiers, and there wasn't one in the country. If a soldier is seen in the pastures, the French bulls get after them! Blue is better: then you aren't chased!" It had come Elizabeth's time to read. She made preparations for it with the finest sense of how beautiful an occasion it was going to be: she hunted for the best chairs; she pushed them together near one of the windows where the last afternoon light from the snow-darkened sky began to fall mystically; then she went to the children's corner of Fairy Tales and softly peered along the shelf; and she drew out a well-remembered volume. Then, seating herself before her auditors, she began in the sweetest, most faltering of voices to read a story that in earlier years had charmed them all. She had scarcely begun before she discovered that she no longer had an audience: nobody listened. Saddest of all, Elizabeth found that she did not herself listen: she could no longer draw close even to the boundaries of that once magical world: it was gone from her and now she herself loved it only as she saw it in the dim distance--on the Elysian Fields of lost things. There may have been something of import to the future of this nation in the way in which these four country children, crowded as it were on a narrow headland looking toward the Past, there said good-by for the last time to faith in the whole literature of Fairy Land. The splendid, the terrible race of creatures which once had peopled the world of imagination for races and civilizations had now crumbled to dust at the touch of those little minds. For in the hard white light of our New World backward, always backward toward the cradle moves the retreating line of faith in the old superstitions: the shadows of the supernatural retire more and more toward the very curtains that cradle infancy; and it may be that the last miracle of fable will die where it was born--on the lips of the child. Elizabeth's face flamed red as she shut the book. It was dead to her; but her brain was musical with refrains about things that had gone to those inner Fields of hers; and now as though she felt herself just a little alone--even from Herbert--she walked away to the piano:-- "You wouldn't listen to the story, but you'll have to listen to a song! This is _my_ song to a Fairy--my slumber song! It is away off in the woods, and I go all by myself to where she is, and I sing this song to her." So Elizabeth sang:-- "Over thee bright dews be shaken; On thine eyelids violets blow; At thy hand white stars awaken; Past thee sun and darkness go!