Some way Queen Imagin disappeared then.  To any person less knowing than myself, it would have seemed as if a dandelion ball was floating in the air; but I knew better, and I watched her sailing, sailing away till lost behind the trees.  The crown was gone, too; I discovered nothing in the neighborhood of the red mushroom, except a tiny yellow blossom already wilted by the heat of the sun.

Well, I am at home.  I sit down this misty autumn morning in my lonely room, and wish for some work or if not that, for something to play with.  I am too old for dolls, but very young in the way of amusement.  Ah—­the closet!  I’ll unlock that; the key is at hand—­in my writing-desk.

Open Sesame!  On the top shelf sits little Fancie, her eyes shining like diamonds in her soft, dusky cobweb.  She nods, so do I, and we are in Greenside again—­on a summer evening.  How the crickets sing; and the tree-toads harp in the trees as if they were a picket guard entirely surrounding us.  Hueston’s big dog barks in the lane at just the right distance.  What security I used to feel when I was a little child, tucked away in my bed, and heard a dog bark a mile away; too far off ever to come up and bite, and yet near enough to frighten prowling robbers!

“When in the breeze the distant watch-dog bayed,” I was about to say; but Polly, who is at Greenside with me, calls, “Just hear the mosquitoes.”

The blinds must be closed.  What a delicious smell comes in!  The dew wetting all the shrubs and flowers distils sweet odors.  What a family of moths have rushed in; this big, brown one, with white and red markings, is very enterprising.  He has voyaged twice down the lamp chimney, as if it were the funnel of a steamship.

Get out, moth!

“Sho,” she answers in a husky voice, as if very dry, “It is my nature to; that’s all you know, turning us to moral purposes, and making us a tiresome metaphor.  We are much like you human creatures—­only we don’t compare ourselves continually with others.  We just scorch ourselves as we please.  My cousin, Noctilia Glow-worm, who is out late o’ nights on the grass-bank in poor company—­the Katydids, who board for the season with the widow Poplar—­a two-sided, deceitful woman—­she does not care where I go, and never shrieks out, ’A burnt moth dreads the lamp chimney.’  If she sees me wingless, she coughs, and throws out a green light, but says nothing.  Don’t mind me; there’s more coming.”

It can’t be moths making such a noise on the second shelf.  It is Tom, who calls out to us, from his room, to come, and help him catch a bat.

  “Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
  With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wings.”

“Always mouthing something,” somebody mutters.  But we rush into Tom’s room, and behold him in the middle of the floor, flopping north and south, east and west, with a towel.  No bat is to be seen.  I hear a pretty singing, however, and declare it to be from a young swallow fallen down the chimney; but as there is no fire-place in the room, my opinion goes for nothing.  Tom maintains that it is a bat; that it flew in by the window; and that it is behind the bureau.  He is right, for the bat whirrs up to the ceiling and from that height accosts us in a squeaking voice: