‘I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,’ he answered, laughing softly. She stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes. ‘Then I shall grow up ’xactly like you,’ she said, ‘so that I can always get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.’ ‘Every one’s thin somewhere,’ Paul said, remembering her own explanation. ‘And the Crack into Yesterday and To-morrow is always close by when it’s wanted. That’s the real way of escape.’ She clapped her hands and danced, shaking her hair out in a cloud and laughing with happiness. Paul took her in his arms and kissed her. With a gesture of exquisite dignity, such as animals show when they resent human interference, the child tumbled back into her chair by the table, an expression of polite boredom—though the faintest imaginable—in her eyes. Many a time had he seen the kittens behave exactly in the same way. ‘But how do you know all these things, Nixie, and where do all your ideas come from?’ he asked. ‘They just come to me when I’m thinking of nothing in particular. They float into my head of their own accord like ships, little fairy ships, I suppose. And I think,’ she added dreamily after a moment’s pause, ‘some of them are trees and flowers whispering to me.’ She put her face close to his own across the table, staring into his very brain with her shining eyes. ‘Don’t you think so too, Uncle?’ ‘I think I do,’ he answered honestly. ‘Though some of the things I hear,’ she went on, ‘I don’t understand till a long time afterwards.’ ‘What kind of things, for instance?’ She hesitated, answering slowly after a pause: ‘Things like streams, and the dripping of rain, and the rustling of wet leaves, perhaps. At the time I only hear the noise they make, but afterwards, when I’m alone, doing nothing, it all falls into words and stories—all sorts of lovely things, but _very_ hard to remember, of course.’ She broke off and smiled up into his face with a charm that he could never have put into words. ‘You’ll grow up a poet, Nixie,’ he said. ‘Shall I _really_? But I could never find the rhymes—simply never.’ ‘Some never do,’ he answered; ‘and some—the majority, I think—never find the words even!’ ‘Oh, how dreadful!’ she exclaimed, her face clouding with a pain she could fully understand. ‘Poets who can’t talk at all. I should think they would burst.’ ‘Some of them nearly do,’ he exclaimed, hiding a smile; ‘they get very queer indeed, these poor poets who cannot express themselves. I have known one or two.’ ‘Have you? Oh, Uncle Paul!’ Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy the world could hold. He nodded his head mysteriously. The child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come into her head.