Sarah Brown hoed rather happily for a couple of hours, and then she began to count the beans still waiting trustfully in the queue, waiting to be attended to and freed from their embarrassments.  There were ninety-six, she decided, standing up ostensibly to greet an aeroplane.  She became very glad of the occasional aeroplanes that crossed above her field, and gave her an excuse for standing with a straight back to watch them.  Aeroplanes, crossing singly or in wild-bird formations, are so common in the sky of Faery that every one in those parts, while turning his own eyes inevitably upwards, secretly thinks his neighbour lamentably rustic and unsophisticated for looking at them.

Every aeroplane that crosses Faery feels, I suppose, the reflected magic from the land below, for there is never one with the barest minute to spare that does not pause and try to be clever over Higgins Farm.  You may see one industriously climbing the clouds over the Enchanted Forest, evidently trying hard to be intent on its destination.  You may see it falter, struggling with its sense of duty, and then break weakly into a mild figure eight.  The ragged rooks of Faery at once hurry into the air to show their laborious imitator how this should be done.  The spirit of frivolous competition enters into the aeroplane, its duty is flung to the winds.  It flaunts itself up and down once or twice, as if to say:  “Now look, everybody, I’m going to be clever.”  Then it goes mad.  It leaps upon imaginary Boches, it stands upon its head and falls downward until the very butterflies begin to take cover, it stands upon its tail and falls upward, it writes messages in a flowing hand across the sky and returns to cross the t’s.  It circles impertinently round your head, fixing its bold tricolour eye upon you until you begin to think there must be something wrong with your appearance.  It bounds upon a field of onions and rebounds in the same breath from the topmost cloud of heaven.  The rooks return disconsolately to their nests.

Then you may see the erring machine suddenly remember itself, and check itself in the act of some new paroxysm.  It remembers the European War that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly.  The eastern sky becomes once more its highway instead of its trapeze.  It collects its wits, emits a few contrite bubbles of smoke, and leaps beyond sight.

Whenever this happened, the female fairies behaved in a very plebeian and forward manner, waving their hoes at each machine, encouraging it by brazen gestures to further extravagances, and striving to reach its hearing with loud shrill cries.  There was very little difference between these fairies and other lady war-workers.  In fact they were only distinguishable by their stature and by the empty and innocent expression of their faces.  Also perhaps by their tuneful singing, and by a habit of breaking out suddenly into country dances between the bean-rows.