“Besides,” said the Fairies, “we must follow her into her solitude, to see if she is happy.”

Ah! there, lying back once more in the easy chair, in a dress which—­

  “China’s gayest art had dyed,”

do you think that self-satisfied, but still uncheerful looking face tells of happiness?

No!  She too, like Aurora, was unoccupied, and forecasting into futurity for the “good time coming,” which so many spend their lives in craving after and expecting, but which the proud, the selfish and the idle never reach to.

The Fairies turned from her sorrowful and angry.

* * * * *

In the outskirts of a forest, just where its intricacy had broken away into picturesque openings, leaving visible some strange old trees with knotted trunks and mysteriously twisted branches, sat a young girl sketching.  She was intently engaged, but as her eyes were ever and anon raised from her paper to the opening glade, and one of the old trees, the Fairies had no difficulty in recognizing their protegee, Hermione.  The laughing face of childhood had become sobered and refined by sentiment and strength, but contentment and even enjoyment beamed in her eyes as she thoughtfully and earnestly pursued her beautiful art.  The little beings who hovered around her in that sweet spot, almost forgot they were not in Fairy land; the air was so full of sweet odours from ferns and mosses, and the many other delicious scents you find so constantly in woods.

Besides which, it amused the good souls to watch Hermione’s skilful hand tracing the scene before her; and they felt an admiring delight when they saw the old tree of the forest reappear on the paper, with all the shadows and lights the sun just then threw upon it, and they wondered not a little at the skill with which she gave distance and perspective to the glade beyond.  They felt, too, that though the drawing they saw rising under the sketcher’s hand was not made powerful by brilliant effects or striking contrasts, it was nevertheless overflowing with the truth and sentiment of nature.  It was the impression of the scene itself, viewed through the poetry of the artist’s mind; and as the delicate creatures who hung over the picture, looked at it, they almost longed for it, slight as it was, that they might carry it away, and hang it up in their fairy palace as a faithful representation of one of the loveliest spots of earth, the outskirts of an ancient English forest.

It is impossible to say how long they might not have staid watching Hermione, but that after a time the sketch was finished, and the young lady after writing beneath it Schiller’s well known line in Wallenstein, arose.  “Das ist das Loos des Schoenen auf der Erde."[1]

[1] “Such is the lot of the beautiful upon earth.”