strange appearance when looked at from behind.  The pavement was the same as the pavement of which I was weary and of which so many thousand miles lay the other side of those houses, but the street was of most pure untrampled grass with such marvellous flowers in it that they lured downward from great heights the flocks of butterflies as they traveled by, going I know not whence.  The other side of the street there was pavement again but no houses of any kind, and what there was in place of them I did not stop to see, for I turned to my right and walked along the back of Go-by Street till I came to the open fields and the gardens of the cottages that I sought.  Huge flowers went up out of these gardens like slow rockets and burst into purple blooms and stood there huge and radiant on six-foot stalks and softly sang strange songs.  Others came up beside them and bloomed and began singing too.  A very old witch came out of her cottage by the back door and into the garden in which I stood.

“What are these wonderful flowers?” I said to her.

“Hush!  Hush!” she said, “I am putting the poets to bed.  These flowers are their dreams.”

And in a lower voice I said:  “What wonderful songs are they singing?” and she said, “Be still and listen.”

And I listened and found they were singing of my own childhood and of things that happened there so far away that I had quite forgotten them till I heard the wonderful song.

“Why is the song so faint?” I said to her.

“Dead voices,” she said, “Dead voices,” and turned back again to her cottage saying:  “Dead voices” still, but softly for fear that she should wake the poets.  “They sleep so badly while they live,” she said.

I stole on tiptoe upstairs to the little room from whose windows, looking one way, we see the fields we know and, looking another, those hilly lands that I sought—­almost I feared not to find them.  I looked at once toward the mountains of faery; the afterglow of the sunset flamed on them, their avalanches flashed on their violet slopes coming down tremendous from emerald peaks of ice; and there was the old gap in the blue-grey hills above the precipice of amethyst whence one sees the Lands of Dream.

All was still in the room where the poets slept when I came quietly down.  The old witch sat by a table with a lamp, knitting a splendid cloak of gold and green for a king that had been dead a thousand years.

“Is it any use,” I said, “to the king that is dead that you sit and knit him a cloak of gold and green?”

“Who knows?” she said.

“What a silly question to ask,” said her old black cat who lay curled by the fluttering fire.

Already the stars were shining on that romantic land when I closed the witch’s door; already the glow-worms were mounting guard for the night around those magical cottages.  I turned and trudged for the gap in the blue-grey mountains.