FullReads

But she never quite lost heart; her papa was a literary man and wrote tales, some of which she feared were not as true as they affected to be, while he invariably neglected to insert a moral in any of them; frequently she dropped little remarks before him with apparent carelessness, in the hope that he might put them in print–but he never did; she never could recognise herself as a character in any of his stories, and so at last she gave up reading them at all!

But one morning she came more near to giving up in utter despair than ever before. Only the previous day she had been so hopeful! her father had really seemed to be beginning to appreciate his little daughter, and had presented her with sixpence in the new coinage to put in her money-box. This had emboldened her to such a degree that, happening on the following morning to hear him ejaculate ‘Confound it!’ she had, pressing one hand to her beating heart and laying the other hand softly upon his shoulder (which is the proper attitude on these occasions), reminded him that such an expression was scarcely less reprehensible than actual bad language. Upon which her hard-hearted papa had told her, almost sharply, ‘not to be a little prig!‘

Priscilla forgave him, of course, and freely, because he was her father and it was her duty to bear with him; but she felt the injustice deeply, for all that. Then, when she went up into the nursery, Alick and Betty made a frantic uproar, merely because she insisted on teaching them the moves in chess, when they perversely wanted to play Halma! So, feeling baffled and sick at heart, she had put on her hat and run out all alone to a quiet lane near her home, where she could soothe her troubled mind by thinking over the ingratitude and lack of appreciation with which her efforts were met.

She had not gone very far up the lane when she saw, seated on a bench, a bent old woman in a poke-bonnet with a crutch-handled stick in her hands, and this old woman Priscilla (who was very quick of observation) instantly guessed to be a fairy–in which, as it fell out, she was perfectly right.

‘Good day, my pretty child!’ croaked the old dame.

‘Good-day to you, ma’am!’ answered Priscilla politely (for she knew that it was not only right but prudent to be civil to fairies, particularly when they take the form of old women). ‘But, if you please, you mustn’t call me pretty–because I am not. At least,’ she added, for she prided herself upon her truthfulness, ‘not exactly pretty. And I should hate to be always thinking about my looks, like poor Milly–she’s our housemaid, you know–and I so often have to tell her that she did not make her own face.’

‘I don’t alarm you, I see,’ said the old crone; ‘but possibly you’re not aware that you’re talking to a fairy?’

‘Oh, yes, I am–but I’m not a bit afraid, because, you see, fairies can only hurt bad children.’

‘Ah, and you’re a good little child–that’s not difficult to see!’

‘They don’t see it at home!’ said Priscilla, with a sad little sigh, ‘or they would listen more when I tell them of things they oughtn’t to do.’

‘And what things do they do that they oughtn’t to, my child–if you don’t mind telling me?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind in the least!’ Priscilla hastened to assure her; and then she told the old woman all her family’s faults, and the trial it was to bear with them and go on trying to induce them to mend their ways. ‘And papa is getting worse than ever,’ she concluded dolefully; ‘only fancy, this very morning he called me a little prig!’

‘Tut, tut!’ said the fairy sympathetically, ‘deary, deary me! So he called you that, did he?–“a little prig”! And you, too! Ah, the world’s coming to a pretty pass! I suppose, now, your papa and the rest of them have got it into their heads that you are too young and too inexperienced to set up as their adviser–is that it?’