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The Parties of the May-Day Fairies: May

What would you call them, what could you call them, but fairies, little people smaller than these commas, that can hide a whole Oak Tree in a thing no bigger than an acorn and then bring it out again and set it up full size, a hundred feet high and four feet thick? And these same fairies put one of those Goliath Methuselahs of the tree world, the Sequoias, into a package not nearly as big as an acorn and wind it up, somehow, so that when it comes out it will not only straighten up into a giant over 300 feet high and more than 30 feet through at the waist, but stand and keep watch and ward in the forest for five thousand years, or there-abouts.

They're busy everywhere, these wonderful little dwellers in the flowers, working the same magic on everything they touch, from the great trees, whose lives are measured by centuries, to the grasses of the field which to-day are and to-morrow are no more.

And what a gay time they are having, with their pretty dresses and their perfumes and their goings to and fro in their own or in hired machines! London or Paris or Newport or Oconomowoc in the height of the social season is nothing to it.

Why, just think of the myriads of flowers, of one kind and another, all in bloom at one time, in May say, the height of the social season among the flowers, and the tens of thousands of bees or butterflies or moths carrying the fairy guests to the pollen-parties of the Magnolias, the Tulip Trees, the Horse-Chestnuts, the Locusts, the Wild Cherries, the Hawthorns, the Sour-Gums, the Mountain-Laurels; and the billions of the winged pollen-grains of such trees as the Black Ash, the Walnuts, the Hickories, the Oaks--all travelling in the wind, here, there, and everywhere, from flower to flower, along the airy highroads of the day and night!

I have spoken of these travellings-about and these gatherings among the fairy folk as "parties." Wouldn't you say they were parties, and pretty big ones, too, in the sense of being important affairs and largely attended? I. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT PRETTY DRESS?