“You pack up that precious bag of tricks of yours,” I should have said to him (it would have been rude, but that is how I should have felt), “and get outside with it. I’m not taking anything in your line to-day. I don’t require any supernatural aid to get me into trouble. All the worry I want I can get down here, so it’s no good your calling. You take that little joke of yours,—I don’t know what it is, but I know enough not to want to know,—and run it off on some other idiot. I’m not priggish. I have no objection to an innocent game of ‘catch-questions’ in the ordinary way, and when I get a turn myself. But if I’ve got to pay every time, and the stakes are to be my earthly happiness plus my future existence—why, I don’t play. There was the case of Midas; a nice, shabby trick you fellows played off upon him! making pretence you did not understand him, twisting round the poor old fellow’s words, just for all the world as though you were a pack of Old Bailey lawyers, trying to trip up a witness; I’m ashamed of the lot of you, and I tell you so—coming down here, fooling poor unsuspecting mortals with your nonsense, as though we had not enough to harry us as it was. Then there was that other case of the poor old peasant couple to whom you promised three wishes, the whole thing ending in a black pudding. And they never got even that. You thought that funny, I suppose. That was your fairy humour! A pity, I say, you have not, all of you, something better to do with your time. As I said before, you take that celestial ‘Joe Miller’ of yours and work it off on somebody else. I have read my fairy lore, and I have read my mythology, and I don’t want any of your blessings. And what’s more, I’m not going to have them. When I want blessings I will put up with the usual sort we are accustomed to down here. You know the ones I mean, the disguised brand—the blessings that no human being would think were blessings, if he were not told; the blessings that don’t look like blessings, that don’t feel like blessings; that, as a matter of fact, are not blessings, practically speaking; the blessings that other people think are blessings for us and that we don’t. They’ve got their drawbacks, but they are better than yours, at any rate, and they are sooner over. I don’t want your blessings at any price. If you leave one here I shall simply throw it out after you.” I feel confident I should have answered in that strain, and I feel it would have done good. Somebody ought to have spoken plainly, because with fairies and angels of that sort fooling about, no one was ever safe for a moment. Children could hardly have been allowed outside the door. One never could have told what silly trick some would-be funny fairy might be waiting to play off on them. The poor child would not know, and would think it was getting something worth having. The wonder to me is that some of those angels didn’t get tarred and feathered.