The Water-Babies

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Charles Kingsley. The Water-Babies

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII AND LAST

MORAL

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A mile off, and a thousand feet down.

So Tom found it; though it seemed as if he could have chucked a pebble on to the back of the woman in the red petticoat who was weeding in the garden, or even across the dale to the rocks beyond.  For the bottom of the valley was just one field broad, and on the other side ran the stream; and above it, gray crag, gray down, gray stair, gray moor walled up to heaven.

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The reason of his falling into such a delightful sleep is very simple; and yet hardly any one has found it out.  It was merely that the fairies took him.

Some people think that there are no fairies.  Cousin Cramchild tells little folks so in his Conversations.  Well, perhaps there are none—in Boston, U.S., where he was raised.  There are only a clumsy lot of spirits there, who can’t make people hear without thumping on the table: but they get their living thereby, and I suppose that is all they want.  And Aunt Agitate, in her Arguments on political economy, says there are none.  Well, perhaps there are none—in her political economy.  But it is a wide world, my little man—and thank Heaven for it, for else, between crinolines and theories, some of us would get squashed—and plenty of room in it for fairies, without people seeing them; unless, of course, they look in the right place.  The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.  There is life in you; and it is the life in you which makes you grow, and move, and think: and yet you can’t see it.  And there is steam in a steam-engine; and that is what makes it move: and yet you can’t see it; and so there may be fairies in the world, and they may be just what makes the world go round to the old tune of

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