The Mysterious Tramp by Vera C. Barclay — Read

"I lived," said the tramp, "in a little house on the edge of a wood just outside a village. I had a little daughter. She was more like a fairy than a child. Her mother died when she was a wee girl. I was an artist. I used to paint pictures of the woods and lanes and trees -- the woods by moonlight, the woods at sunrise, the woods all green and blue in spring; the woods looking like dark, solemn churches on winter afternoons, with the red and gold and purple sunset showing through the fine black traceries of the trees like the stained-glass windows of a Gothic cathedral, and blue mist hanging about like incense. And somehow there were always fairies peeping out somewhere in my pictures -- Mariette expected them. And after all, what are artists for if not to see what ordinary people miss and put what they see into their pictures? We had no friends, Mariette and I -- we didn't want any. We had each other and the fairies.

"Sometimes I used to spend the night out in the woods, getting pictures into my head to paint by day, or so as to catch the very first glimmer of golden clouds for a picture of the sunrise fairies. I used to leave Mariette at the cottage of my old nurse, whom she loved very much. It was on one of these sunrise days that my bad dreams began.