FAIRY FLITTERWINGS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 4, 26 March 1927, Page 23 (Supplement)

FAIRY FLITTERWINGS

Little Fairy Flitterwing had no home. Whenever he settled down in a place something happened to turn him out. If he found a comfortable rosebud someone would pick it and then it died and he was homeless again. If he chose a pink-edged daisy to live in, the gardener would mow the lawn at once. He grew very tired of wandering about and determined at last to go out into the world in search of a home. At first the streets frightened him, but in one he found a place between two stones where a few blades of grass grew and there he decided to stay. He was so very tired of moving from rose to rose and from daisy to daisy that very soon he felt quite at home. Every morning, of course, he had to attend to the grass and see that it was always fresh and green, for it is the business of every fairy to take care of the place he lives in. He does it instead of paying rent. But one morning poor Flitterwing received a great shock. He -was very busy cleaning the grass’ w'ith a dewdrop and thinking how strong the blades had grown since he first began to take care of them, when he heard a heavy footstep. ‘‘Oh dear, oh dear,” he cried, “here’s a man with a hoe! I’m sure he’s going to turn me out!” One by one the tufts were dragged up by the roots. “The sooner I get out of this the better,” said Flitterwing, skipping nimbly out of the way. Then he spread his wings and flew up and away, over the buildings and on and on. At last he became dreadfully tired. It would be impossible, he felt, to go

on flying much longer, so he looked about him for shelter. He saw an open window and beyond it a long, cool room, so he flew straight in. A large ink-pot stood on a table and just inside it was a little ledge where a fairy might rest comfortably. Flitterwing lost no time. He darted in, sat down on the ledge, folded his tired wings about him and in a few moments was fast asleep. Now the room into which Flitterwing had flown was a place where a great deal of business was done. Every day a number of men sat there adding up figures, and writing letters about dull things that very few people understand. But none of the men in the big room really liked it. They wanted to be playing cricket or reading books or listening to beautiful music. And there was one among them—a little man with a pale face and a thin coat —who wished above all things to be making poetry. He would have liked to have put his thoughts into words but he did not in the least know how poetry ought to be made. Now when Flitterwing took refuge in the ink-pot the Man in the Thin Coat was very busy. There were rows and rows of figures waiting to be added up, so that there seemed no end to them. A large sheet of paper was before him on which he was doing these sums. Suddenly something glittered in the air for a moment and then disappeared. It was so bright that : : t caught his eye and made him lose his place. He thought it was some beautiful kind of insect with the sunshine caught in its wings. Then he dipped his pen into the ink-pot again. He had been working busily for some time when he noticed something very curious. His pen was not writing figures at all. He was thinking about figures and he wished to put figures oil the paper but his pen was writing words all the time. The words were arranged in short lines with a capital letter at the end of each line. “Dear me, how annoying!” he said to himself. “This will never do.” And he took a fresh sheet and began again. Then he glanced at what he had written. There were no figures at all on the paper; nothing but line after line of words. And so it went on until the Man in the Thin Coat was in despair. “There is something the matter with me,” he said to himself. He did not notice that another man had come up to the table and was gathering together the sheets of paper that lay on it. “This is a very beautiful poem!” he exclaimed. “But you should not have written it during working hours.” “I couldn’t help it,” said the Man in the Thin Coat meekly. Flitterwing slipped out of the inkpot and flew off to play with a sunbeam on the wi’y’ : ill. The sunbeam told him of a comfortable geranium growing in a window not far off, so Flitterwing went to live there. “I have brought fame to the Man “and now I have found a safe home in the Thin Coat,” he thought happily, at last.”