“Once in a blue moon!” said Nillywill, waiting for her dream to become altogether true. “Let us go now,” she said, “where I can put away my crown! To-night has brought you to me, and the blue moon has come for us: let us go!”

“Where shall we go?” asked Hands.

“As far as we can,” cried Nillywill. “Suppose to the blue moon! To-night it seems as if one might tread on water or air. Yonder across the sea, with the stars for stepping-stones, we might get to the blue moon as it sets into the waves.”

But as they went through the deep alleys of the garden that led down to the shore they came to a sight more wonderful than anything they had yet seen.

Before them, facing toward the sea, stood two great reindeer, their high horns reaching to the overhead boughs; and behind them lay a sledge, long and with deep sides like the sides of a ship. All blue they seemed in that strange light.

There, too, but nearer to hand, was the moon-fay himself waiting--a great figure of lofty stature, clad in furs of blue fox-skin, and with heron’s wings fastened above the flaps of his hood; and these lifted themselves and clapped as Hands and the Princess drew near.

“Are you coming to the blue moon?” called the fay, and his voice whistled and shrilled to them like the voice of a wind.

Hands-pansy gave back answer stoutly: “Yes, yes, we are coming!” And indeed what better could he say?

“But,” cried Nillywill, holding back for a moment, “what will the blue moon do for us?”

“Once you are there,” answered the moon-fay, “you can have your wish and your heart’s desire; but only once in a blue moon can you have it. Are you coming?”

“We are coming!” cried Nillywill. “Oh, let us make haste!”

“Tread softly,” whispered the moon-fay, “and stoop well under these boughs, for if anything awakes to behold the blue moon, the memory of it can never die. On earth only the nightingale of all living things has beheld a blue moon; and the triumph and pain of that memory wakens him ever since to sing all night long. Tread softly, lest others waken and learn to cry after us; for we in the blue moon have our sleep troubled by those who cry for a blue moon to return.” He looked towards Nillywill, and smiled with friendly eyes. “Come!” he said again, and all at once they had leapt upon the sledge, and the reindeer were running fast down towards the sea.

The blue moon was resting with its lower rim upon the waters. At that sight, before they were clear of the avenues of the garden, one of the reindeer tossed up his great branching horns and snorted aloud for joy. With a soft stir in the thick boughs overhead, a bird with a great trail of feathers moved upon its perch.

The sledge, gliding from land, passed out over the smoothed waters, running swiftly as upon ice; and the reflection of the stars shone up like glow-worms as Nillywill and Hands-pansy, in the moon-fay’s company, sped away along its bright surface.

The still air whistled through the reindeers’ horns; so fast they went that the trees and the hanging gardens and the palace walls melted away from view like wreaths of smoke. Sky and sea became one magic sapphire drawing them in towards the centre of its life, to the heart of the blue moon itself.

When the blue moon had set below the sea, then far behind them upon the land they had left the leaves rustled and drew sharply together, shuddering to get rid of the stony stillness, and the magic hues in which they had been dyed; and again the nightingale broke out into passionate triumph and complaint.

Then also, from the bough which the reindeer had brushed with its horns, a peacock threw back its head and cried in harsh lamentation, having no sweet voice wherewith to acclaim its prize. And so ever since it cries, as it goes up into the boughs to roost, because it shares with the nightingale its grief for the memory of departed beauty which never returns to earth save once in a blue moon.

But Nillywill and Hands-pansy, living together in the blue moon, look back upon the world, if now and then they choose to remember, without any longing for it or sorrow.

THE WISHING-POT

Tulip was the son of a poor but prudent mother; from the moment of his birth she had trained him to count ten before ever he wanted or asked for anything. An otherwise reckless youth, he acquired an intrinsic value through the practice of this habit. Only once, just as he was reaching, but had not quite reached, years of discretion, did his habit of precaution fail him; and this same failure became in the end the opening of his fortunes.

Bathing one day in the river, to whose banks the woods ran down in steep terraces, he heard a voice come singing along one of the upper slopes; and looking up under the boughs of cedar and sycamore, he saw a pair of green feet go dancing by, up and down like grasshoppers on the prance.

There was such rhythm in them, and such sweetness in the voice, that his heart was out of him before he could harness it to the number ten, and he came out of the water the most natural and forlorn of lovers.

Before he was dressed the green feet and the voice were gone, and before he got home his health and his appetite seemed to have gone also. He pined industriously from day to day, and spent all his hours in searching among the woods by the river side for his lady of the dear green feet. He did not know so much as the size or colour of her face; the sound of her voice alone, and the running up and down of her feet, had, as he told his mother, “decimated his affections.”

In his trouble he could think of only one possible remedy, and that he counted well over, knowing its risk. Away in the loneliest part of the forest there lived a wise woman, to whom, now and then, folk went for help when everything else had failed them. So he had heard tell of a certain Wishing-Pot that was hers in which people might see the thing they desired most, and into which for a fee she allowed lovers and other poor fools of fortune to look. One thing, however, was told against the virtues of this Wishing-Pot, that though many had had a sight of it, and their wishes revealed to them therein, others had gone and had never again returned to their homes, but had vanished altogether from men’s sight, nor had any news ever been heard of them after. There were some wise folk who held that they had only gone elsewhere to seek the fortune that the Wishing-Pot had shown to them. Nevertheless, for the most part, the wise woman and her Wishing-Pot had an ill name in that neighbourhood.

To a lover’s heart risk gives value; so one fine morning Tulip kissed his mother, counted ten, and set out for the woods.

Towards evening he came to the house of the witch and knocked at the door. “Good mother,” said he, when she opened to him, “I have brought you the fee to buy myself a wish over the Wishing-Pot.” “Ay, surely,” answered the crone, and drew him in.

In one corner of the room stood a great crystal bowl. Nearly round it was, and had a small opening at the top, to which a man might place his eye and look in. To Tulip, as he looked at it, it seemed all coloured fires and falling stars, and a soft crackling sound came from it, as though heat burned in its veins. It threw long shapes and lustres upon the walls, and within innumerable things writhed, and ran, and whiffed in the floating of its vapours.

“You may have two wishes,” said the old witch, “a one and a two.” And she said the spell that undid the secret of the Pot to the wisher.

Then Tulip bent down his head and looked in, counting softly to himself, and at ten, he let the wish go to his lady of the dear green feet.

The colours changed and sprang, as though stirred and fed with fresh fuel; and down in the depths of the Wishing-Pot he saw the feet of his Beloved go by in twinkling green slippers.

As soon as he saw that he began counting ten in great haste for the second wish. “O to be inside the Wishing-Pot with her!” was his thought now. He had got to nine, and the wish was almost on his tongue, when he caught sight of the old woman’s eye looking at him. And the eye had become like a large green spider, with great long limbs that kept clutching up and out again!

His heart queegled to a jelly at the sight; but the green feet lured him so, that he still thought how to get to them and yet be safe. Surely, to be in the Wishing-Pot and out by the sound of the next Angelus became the shape of his wish. He shut his eyes, cried ten upon the venture, and was in the Wishing-Pot!

The little green feet were trebling over the glass with a sound like running water; and he himself began running at full speed, shot off into the Wishing-Pot like a pellet from a pop-gun. Nothing could he see of his dear but her wee green feet. But above them as they ran he heard showery laughter, and he knew that his lady was there before him, though invisible to the eye.

The Pot, now he was in it, seemed bigger than the biggest dome in the world; to run all round it took him two or three minutes. Away in the centre of its base stood a great opal knob, like the axle to a wheel round which he and the green feet kept circling.