“Love him? Have you ever met before?” “No; but he pulled me out of the water.” “Come--this won’t do. I must know more about you.” She laughed and put out her hand coaxingly. “Shall I tell you? A little, perhaps. I am from a big forest out west there, where wheels drone like hornets among the trees and black men rise out of the ground. I have no father or mother, for I come of the fairies. Those who stood for them married late and had a baby and they delayed to christen it. One day the baby was gone and I was there. They knew me for a changeling from the first and didn’t love me. But I lived with them for all that and they got to hate me more and more. Not a cow died or a gammer was wryed wi’ the rheumatics but I had done it. Bit by bit the old man lost all his trade and loved me none the more, I can tell you. He was a Beast Leech, and where was the use of the forest folk sending for him to mend their sick kine when he kept a changeling to undo it all? At last they could stand no more of it and the woman brought me away and lost me.” “Lost you?” echoed my father. “Oh,” said Zyp, with a little cluck, “I knew all along how the tramp was to end. There was an old one, a woman, lived in the forest, and she told me a deal of things. She knew me better than them all, and I loved her because she was evil, so they said. She told me some rhymes and plenty of other things.” “Well?” said my father. “We walked east by the sun for days and days. Then we came to the top of a big, soft hill, where little beetles were hopping among the grass, and below us was a great town like stones in a green old quarry, and the woman said: ‘Run down and ask the name of it while I rest here.’ And I ran with the wind in my face and was joyful, for I knew that she would escape when I was gone, and I should never see her again.” “And then you tumbled into the water?” said my father. Zyp nodded. “And now,” she said, “I belong to nobody, and will you have me?” My father shook his head, and in a moment sobs most piteous were shaking the girl’s throat. So forlorn and pretty a sight I have never seen before or since. “Well,” he said, “if nobody comes to claim you, you may stop.” And stop Zyp did. Surely was never an odder coming, yet from that day she was one of us. What was truthful and what imaginative in her story I have never known, for from first to last this was the most we heard of it. One thing was certain. Zyp was by nature a child of the open air and the sun. Flowers that were wild she loved--not those that were cultivated, however beautiful, of which she was indifferent--and she had an unspeakable imagination in reading their fanciful histories and a strange faculty for fondling them, as it were, into sentient beings. I can hardly claim belief when I say that I have seen a rough nettle fade when she scolded it for stinging her finger, or a little yellow rock rose turn from the sun to her when she talked to it.