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There was once a fairy who wanted to know all the things that ever were. This was very unusual, because most fairies know a great deal more than they have time to do; but somehow this fairy, who was named Gillibloom, had an idea that mortals know a great deal and that fairies would be happier if they could find out what some of the things are.

So he went to the Fairy Queen and asked for leave of absence for thirty-three and a third years, that he might go and live among mortals and learn things.

At the end of thirty-three and a third years he came back again, and he found the fairies dancing just as if they had never left off. They were all perfectly delighted to see him, and they left off dancing and crowded round him and cried out all together, which is the way the fairies sometimes talk: “O Gillibloom, what have you learned?”

Gillibloom looked at them a few minutes very solemnly, as if he wanted them to pay great attention to what he was going to say. Then he answered: “I have not really learned anything, but I have almost learned to cry.”

“To cry, Gillibloom?” called the fairies. “What is that?”

“I know,” cried a fairy who was a great traveller, and had once gone on a moonbeam excursion to a large town. “It’s what mortals do when they want something they haven’t got, or have something they don’t want.”

“Yes,” said Gillibloom, “that is it.”

“But what good is it?” asked the other fairies.

“I don’t really know,” said Gillibloom: “but I think it is really very good indeed, because so many of them do it. Sometimes if you are very little and want something, and cry and cry, somebody brings it to you.”

“But we don’t want anything we can’t get without crying,” said the fairies.

“Yes, that is true,” said Gillibloom. “But it can’t be that so many people would cry if there wasn’t some use in it. Try as I may, I can’t find out what the use is, but I thought I might form a class and we could all cry together, and then we should see what happened.”

Now some of the fairies were too busy painting flowers to join a class, and more were too busy riding on bees’ wings, but there were a few dozen who said:

“We might as well join. Why not? It will please Gillibloom, and maybe there is some use in it, after all.”

So Gillibloom appointed the next night by the banks of the Standing Pool, for, he said, it would be quite impossible at first to cry anywhere except by the side of still water.

The next night they were all there, twenty-seven of them, each with a moss-cup in his hand.

So the fairies all sat down in a circle, and looked pleasantly about at one another and said: “We are here to cry.”

“Now, in the beginning,” said Gillibloom, “I will show you how it is done. The first three of you there by the acorn must run at me and knock off my cap.”

So the first three ran gaily at him and knocked off his cap, but they might as well not have done it, for another cap, just as green and with just as red a feather, blew right down from somewhere else and settled on his head, and the fairies laughed, and Gillibloom did, too.

“Well,” said he, “the next three of you must trip me up, and I’ll fall down on the ground, and then I’ll show you how to cry.”

So the next three tripped him up, and Gillibloom didn’t mind it in the least, because, whatever you do in the fairy woods, it never hurts. But he remembered that he was the teacher, and if he didn’t begin to teach he would pretty soon be no teacher at all. So he sat there on the ground and made up a dreadful face, and wrinkled his forehead and shut his eyes and pulled down the corners of his mouth. And then he dipped his own moss-cup carefully into the Standing Pool, and brought up a drop of water. And he put his fingers in it and splashed some on his face; and it ran down his cheeks, and he said proudly: “Now I am almost crying.”