THE WOODMAN'S FUNERAL.
Daisy did not see the lightning, nor hear the snakes, nor feel the drops
of rain that began to patter down; she only felt the cold hand that
would never lead her through the wood again; for when she lifted it, it
fell back on the ground, dead--dead!
She asked her mother if they were not going home; but Susan said her
home was with Peter; and if he staid out in the dark wood, she must stay
there, too. She was frightened, and wild with sorrow, and did not know
what she was saying, and began, at last, to blame the old woman, who had
brought her there, she said, to be so happy for a little while, and
always afterwards lonely and wretched--the old hag!
"What old hag!" said a voice close to Susan's ear, that brought her
senses back quickly. "Is this all your gratitude, Susan? And are you
going to kill your child, out here, with the cold and damp, because your
husband's gone? Come! we must bury him; and then away to your home, and
don't sit here, abusing your best friend."
Daisy, you know, had never seen the woman, and she had never looked so
dreadfully as now; she was pale and starved, and her great eyes
glittered like the eyes of the snakes, and her voice was sharp and
shrill enough to have frightened one on a pleasanter night than that.
With Peter's axe the fairy sharpened two stout sticks; one of these she
made Susan take, and there, by the light of the quick flashes of
lightning, and a little lantern that the woman wore like a brooch on her
bosom, Daisy watched them dig her father's grave.
The fallen tree was one of the largest in the wood, and the two women
could not lift it; so they dug the earth away at the side and
underneath the trunk; and when the place was deep enough, poor Peter's
body dropped into its grave. While her mother and the fairy were filling
it over with earth, Daisy went for the moss which she had gathered to
show her father, and, by the light of the fairy's lamp, picked the
sweetest flowers, and fragrant grasses, and broad leaves that glistened
with the rain, and scattered them on the spot.
Then, with one of Susan's and one of Daisy's hands in hers, the old dame
hurried them out of the wood. They stumbled often over the broken
boughs, and stepped, before they knew it, on the snakes, that only
hissed and slid away among the grass. Susan was crying bitterly, and
their guide kept scolding her, and Daisy heard the wolves growl in their
dens.
She had heard of great funerals, where there were carriages and nodding
plumes, and heavy velvet palls, and bells tolling mournfully; but Daisy
thought it was because her father had been such a good man, that his
funeral was so much grander.
She knew that all about his grave, and on, on, farther than eye could
see, the great forest trees were bending and nodding like black plumes,
and sounds like groans and sighs came from them as they dashed together
in the wind; the lightning was his funeral torch; and the thunder
tolled, instead of bells, at Peter's grave; and the black clouds swept
on like a train of mourners; and the great, quick drops of rain made it
seem as if all the sky were weeping tears of pity for the little girl.
Ah, and Daisy could not see how the dreadful old woman only seemed such,
and was, in truth, a good and gentle fairy, who meant still to watch
over the little orphan with tender care, as she had always done; whose
soft, white wings, even now, were spread above, to shelter her from the
cold rain and wind, and whose kind heart was full of pity for that
little aching heart of hers.
You and I, and all the people we know, walk through the world with this
same strange fairy; who seems to frown, and scold, and force us on
through cruel storms, and yet who is really smiling upon us, and
shielding our shrinking forms with tender care, and leading us gently
home.
Have you thought yet what can be the fairy's name?