Four Gates by Amy Le Feuvre

"My soul blesses the Great Father every day that He has gladdened the earth with little children. "-MARY HOWITT.

IT was a wonderfully mild and bright day towards the end of February. Mrs. Montmorency had gone away to dine and sleep with a friend in Edinburgh. Honor was left alone. She had plenty to do, and was not dull. All the morning, she had been busy doing little things for Mrs. Montmorency; they had had an early lunch, and Honor had accompanied her to the station directly afterwards in the brougham. Now on her way back, a sudden longing seized her, as she passed a wild bit of moor, to get out and walk. She stopped the coachman and told him to drive on without her, and then she found herself treading the dead heather and bracken underfoot, and inhaling the sweet fresh air with a keen sense of enjoyment.

Presently, she came to a little hollow surrounded by gorse bushes. It was a very desolate spot, so that she was startled to hear a small child's voice proceeding from it.

"And so you see, my dear, this is little England, a tiny weeny, little island in a big world!"

She bent forward eagerly. A child's voice was music in her ears; and this voice was a lisping, babyish one, but perfectly refined in tone.

A small girl was busily scooping out the sand in the bottom, entirely engrossed in her game. She was dressed in a little rough blue serge coat and cap. Her flaxen curls were flying in the breeze.

"Hallo! " Honor called out. "May I come down and play with you? I thought you must be a fairy at first, all away from everybody."

The child looked up at her with big blue eyes. Honor might be shy and unattractive to grown-up people. She was never so to children. There seemed a kind of understanding between them at once.

"That's exactly what I am-a fairy, only I'm called Fay by daddy. Do you know what this place is called?"

Honor slipped down the side of the hollow and sat down by the child's side.

"I should think it is Fairy's Hollow."

"You're wrong. It's the world, and I'm just making it fresh like God did once upon a time, and I'm making tiny little England first. It's got to have water round it, you know, to make it an island. Do you know if there is any sea round the corner, where I can get some?"

"I'm afraid we have no sea here. Where do you come from? Have you dropped from the clouds? Who told you that England was a tiny little place?"

"Daddy. He maked it in the sand once, but I'm going to make the whole big, big world, just wherever daddy goes his journeys."

"Where is daddy?"

"I specs he's smoking his pipe, and saying, 'Thank goodness that child is off my hands!"

She burst into a merry peal of laughter as she mimicked her father's bass voice.

"But, darling, it will soon be getting dark. Where is your home? Do you live alone with your father?"

"I lives over there somewhere," she said, waving her small hand in an airy fashion over the part of the moor which Honor was going to cross. "I forgets exactly where it is; we only comed yesterday, and I found this lovely sand all by myself."

Then, sitting down by her sand heap, she clasped her hands together and looked up at Honor with grave sweetness.