"To you," said the fairy. "Look again." "You are the Irishwoman who met me the day I went to Harthover!" And when they looked she was neither of them, and yet all of them at once. "My name is written in my eyes, if you have eyes to see it there." And they looked into her great, deep, soft eyes, and they changed again and again into every hue, as the light changes in a diamond. "Now read my name," said she, at last. And her eyes flashed, for one moment, clear, white, blazing light: but the children could not read her name; for they were dazzled, and hid their faces in their hands. "Not yet, young things, not yet," said she, smiling; and then she turned to Ellie. "You may take him home with you now on Sundays, Ellie. He has won his spurs in the great battle, and become fit to go with you and be a man; because he has done the thing he did not like." So Tom went home with Ellie on Sundays, and sometimes on week-days, too; and he is now a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things which no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues. And all this from what he learnt when he was a water-baby, underneath the sea. "And of course Tom married Ellie?" My dear child, what a silly notion! Don't you know that no one ever marries in a fairy tale, under the rank of a prince or a princess? [Illustration] MORAL _And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable?_ _We should learn thirty-seven or thirty-nine things, I am not exactly sure which: but one thing, at least, we may learn, and that is this--when we see efts in the pond, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins, or put them into vivariums with sticklebacks, that the sticklebacks may prick them in their poor little stomachs, and make them jump out of the glass into somebody's work-box, and so come to a bad end. For these efts are nothing else but the water-babies who are stupid and dirty, and will not learn their lessons and keep themselves clean; and, therefore (as comparative anatomists will tell you fifty years hence, though they are not learned enough to tell you now), their skulls grow fat, their jaws grow out, and their brains grow small, and their tails grow long, and they lose all their ribs (which I am sure you would not like to do), and their skins grow dirty and spotted, and they never get into the clear rivers, much less into the great wide sea, but hang about in dirty ponds, and live in the mud, and eat worms, as they deserve to do._