Starlight Stories: Told to Bright Eyes and Listening Ears (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Starlight Stories: Told to Bright Eyes and Listening Ears

Where Petronilla was born, nobody had ever seen a fairy. It was a poor enough place, - a little cottage built of clay, straw, and rough stones; a little garden, wherein Petronilla's mother worked from morning till night, and a few square yards of arid pasture land, railed in, where two lean-looking goats passed their whole day in turning over the stones with their soft noses, and nibbling at the little tufts of short fresh grass that they found underneath. That was all.

Inside there were but very few necessaries, and no comforts at all. A bed for the mother and Petronilla, and one for Petronel, a three-legged stool, a table, a small mug for Petronilla's milk, a couple of spoons, a horn-handled knife or two. There was little else.

The time had been when things had prospered well with the little family, when there had been far less hard work to do, and more to eat. But that was before Petronilla's father died, just one year ago, when she was but a few weeks old; and when Petronilla's mother, in her bitter, absorbing grief, had forgotten to bake her little Twelfth-night offering of Wheaten-flour cakes for the fairies, so that when the fairies went their rounds before day-break, to gather together their different Twelfth-night gifts, and found no cakes at all, however humble, outside the little cottage door, they were grievously offended - not for the value of the cakes, but because they like to be remembered. And since that, nothing had gone well with the little household.

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