‘No, they can’t do that,’ said the farmer.

‘I lived in the marshes.’

‘Who are you?’ asked the farmer’s wife.

’I am a Wild Thing, and have found a soul in the marshes, and we are kin to the Elf-folk.’

Talking it over afterwards, the farmer and his wife agreed that she must be a gipsy who had been lost, and that she was queer with hunger and exposure.

So that night the little Wild Thing slept in the farmer’s house, but her new soul stayed awake the whole night long dreaming of the beauty of the marshes.

As soon as dawn came over the waste and shone on the farmer’s house, she looked from the window towards the glittering waters, and saw the inner beauty of the marsh.  For the Wild Things only love the marsh and know its haunts, but now she perceived the mystery of its distances and the glamour of its perilous pools, with their fair and deadly mosses, and felt the marvel of the North Wind who comes dominant out of unknown icy lands, and the wonder of that ebb and flow of life when the wildfowl whirl in at evening to the marshlands and at dawn pass out to sea.  And she knew that over her head above the farmer’s house stretched wide Paradise, where perhaps God was now imagining a sunrise while angels played low on lutes, and the sun came rising up on the world below to gladden fields and marsh.

And all that heaven thought, the marsh thought too; for the blue of the marsh was as the blue of heaven, and the great cloud shapes in heaven became the shapes in the marsh, and through each ran momentary rivers of purple, errant between banks of gold.  And the stalwart army of reeds appeared out of the gloom with all their pennons waving as far as the eye could see.  And from another window she saw the vast cathedral gathering its ponderous strength together, and lifting it up in towers out of the marshlands.

She said, ‘I will never, never leave the marsh.’

An hour later she dressed with great difficulty and went down to eat the second meal of her life.  The farmer and his wife were kindly folk, and taught her how to eat.

‘I suppose the gipsies don’t have knives and forks,’ one said to the other afterwards.

After breakfast the farmer went and saw the Dean, who lived near his cathedral, and presently returned and brought back to the Dean’s house the little Wild Thing with the new soul.

‘This is the lady,’ said the farmer.  ‘This is Dean Murnith.’  Then he went away.

‘Ah,’ said the Dean, ’I understand you were lost the other night in the marshes.  It was a terrible night to be lost in the marshes.’

‘I love the marshes,’ said the little Wild Thing with the new soul.

‘Indeed!  How old are you?’ said the Dean.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered.

‘You must know about how old you are,’ he said.

‘Oh, about ninety,’ she said, ‘or more.’

‘Ninety years!’ exclaimed the Dean.