FAIRY PHOTOGRAPHS.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 March 1921, Page 12

FAIRY PHOTOGRAPHS.

ABOUT TO BE PUBLISHED. THE MYSTERIOUS “LEPIDOPTERA.” According to the Daily Express, new photographs o-f “fairies,” taken by Miss Elsie Wright, aged nineteen, of Shipley, and her cousin, Aliss Frances Ealing, of Scarborough, are to be published shortly as illustrations to a book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Air. E. L. Gardner, which will describe all discovered facts about fairy life. The most extraordinary of the new photographs, says the Express, shows a “fairy cradle.” There is a background of rushes and grass round a pool. Faint fairy forms can ibe seen between the grasses, and, hanging from a rush spear in the front is something like a chrysalis, wU>h the shadow outline of a fairy, its wings folded, emerging -from the top. “It should be. remembered,” said Air. E. L/ Gardner; 4n explanation to a Daily Express representative, “that fairies are lepidoptera, and, like butterflies and moths, are mature when they develop from the chrysalis state. They have no sex.” Two dainty fairy beings, gossamerwinged, and garbed in shining white, appear in the other new pictures. One is leaping up almost into the face of Frances Ealing, and quite obviously smiling at the girl. The other is posing before Elsie, perched, nimble-footed, on the top of a flower, and holding out a posy of tiniest harbells. This special sprite shows that the fairies have their fashions, for she wears bobbed hair. Both photographs are dainty and perfectly clear. “Experts to whom the pictures have been shown,” said Air. Gardner, “declare that to obtain ‘fakes’ of such a character a skilful artist would be needed, with all the appliances of an up-to-date studio at his disposal. There can be no question of photographic plate substitution, for the plates used were secretly marked by myself and brought back by me to London.”