Gaillard sat down beside the bed; he took the sick girl’s hand, and, stroking it like a mother, called her his _pauvre petite_ Célestin. She quite touched his heart—her sickness, her pitiable air of helplessness; the orange on the quilt, and the picture of the Lord Jesus watching over her. She had been in great pain all the morning,—a cruel pain, like a hot-iron, in her right lung,—but she was better of the pain now and the cough; she told him so in a mutter, and then asked for a fairy tale. Toto looked in, munching a biscuit; he nodded his head as if satisfied and withdrew, whilst Gaillard in a fit of genius improvised a fairy tale. It was about a green giant called Fantoff. He was quite green, his hair was grass, and his feet were like roots uprooted in some terrible upheaval; his fingers were like carrots, and he turned brown every autumn with the leaves, the larks in spring mistaking his head for a field built on it; so that in this happy season of the year wherever he walked larks sang above him, and whenever he scratched his head a dozen nests were destroyed. At this Célestin, with Dodor in her mind, said “No, no.” So the poet passed on to the cat Mizar and the dwarf Blizzard, whom the giant had, one day in a fit of idleness, carved from a forked carrot; and Célestin, remembering Garnier’s tulip, believed that this might possibly be true. Blizzard, forgetful of the debt of creation, dared to fall in love with the lady beloved by Fantoff, whose name was Primavera, and whose abode was the Castle of Flowers. A hundred thousand tulips defended this castle from behind a holly hedge. They were divided into five armies—red, white, yellow, chocolate, and striped; and Célestin in a half-dream beheld the valiant host whilst Gaillard rambled on. The gardener generalissimo of this army was blind,—he had been blinded by the beauty of Primavera,—and one day as he was wheeling back to the castle a barrow full of roses, who had gone out to fight the camellias and had been badly beaten. Blizzard the dwarf slipped into it under the roses, intent on gaining an entrance to the castle at all hazards, there to declare his love. What happened? Simply this: Algebar, the bird of Paradise, flapped its sapphire wings and shrieked out, “Beware! A carrot is trying to enter the Castle of Flowers. Beware, beware!” and before the faithful bird could call it thrice the door opened, and out came Bastiche, the porter. Bastiche was a giant, who had once been a clothes basket; he was seven hundred feet high, and creaked as he walked. Primavera in a fit of foolishness had endowed him with life, and as he stood on the castle steps he opened his lid and shut it again. He also quite forgot the warning of Algebar, for at that moment rose up from behind the holly hedge the great green head of Fantoff, the larks singing above it merrily.