In a hidden place in the heart of a great wood, there lived a little witch named Willow. Now, Willow was very young, and all the world of people to whom her mother had told her to do kindnesses were so far off she could not find them. Her father was a King of the Fairies, and so she had to rule over the animals, but alas! they were all so frightened of her spells they would not come near her. So she used to sit every day on a mossy bank outside her cottage crying, because she could not find friends.
One day a lovely queen bird flew over her, singing so sweetly that she had a great mind to try if she could not make friends with her. So she called out joyfully, “Oh, please would you come down to me a moment, dear little bird?”
The queen bird flew down and hopped about quite close to her, while she took a pinch of grey dust out of a phial, and said, “Go and give this to the Sea to drink, and that will make him cure the woods where you live for crying so like a damp country. We like it very much when the woods where we live are bright and fresh with good health and sunshine.”
The bird took the dust in her beak, flew down to the big Sea, washed the dust about, drank some of it, and came back in an hour. You have no idea what a change it made in the woods where Willow lived. The winds began to blow and it got very warm; the dry leaves all fell down and suddenly the buds began to spring. Roses opened under her eyes and daisies sprung up the very place they had put their heads in the summer before. The bird was delighted.
“Oh, good witch, good witch!” she said, “you may sit down here in the dusk and you are sure to see plenty of us pass. As fast as the flowers come out, there are insects awake to fly among them.”
“Yes, but I am so afraid you will all be frightened of me,” said Willow.
Then an old thrush, with spectacles on his bill, came slowly up to her, and said in a respectful voice, “I believe I have not entirely lost my eyes; I think you are young and lovely, will you take the trouble to tell me your name?”
“I am called Willow the Witch,” she said, “and I do want to make friends with you all, but you seem so afraid of me.”
“Ah, my dear,” said the thrush, with a forlorn sigh, “we poor dumb animals know what fables mean. We hear of the ogre with the thousand eyes and the thirst of the dragon and the cakes of the little fairy in Perrault’s stories.”
“But they are only fables,” said the bird. “I am afraid my eyes will never be any better. If one could know what becomes of these poor woods when the sun of the king of the fairies shines in the sky.”
“Just as when the sun shines on the face of a happy child,” said the thrush. “But one does not know. That king is merry enough. All the joy he gives makes one drunk almost; and then, of course, one forgets. However, now I am going, good witch, to tell it to the animals round here, for I believe I am the oldest of them all next to the raven. We will none of us come to life till sunrise to-morrow. At mid-day you can ask me any question you please.”
Then Willow began to sing so loud, and with such a sweet voice, the birds thought the cuckoo was already come back from the far country. So they all began to hop from tree to tree surrounding her as a flower bed is full of daisies and buttercups to listen to her song.
“Asking you, thrush,” sang the young witch,
“To come at mid-day to the mossy bank
Where our river glides and whispers so low,
That all the trees and the grass lean down to it,
And kiss it; that soft it falls asleep
As evening draws on, with its tale of roses.”
“So soft they lie. So soft they lie.
So soft they lie.”
“Then the mice, and the dormice, and the birds,
Will come to hear me sing to them all night.
Last summer the woods were still,” she said,
“What were the dreams in our poor birds’ sleep?”
When their fruit trees were stripped of their apples,
And hearing the gales raving, returned;
And their caves cold, with the restless waves
Seven thousand leagues distant in their hearts,
While sunset reddened, or freshened the gales.
“So cold were they. So cold were they.
So cold were they.”
It took a long time to finish, for she never had a happy thought left to herself. But at last it was finished, and its sleep was as sweet as honey. And when it had finished, she threw some garden seeds on the river and said, “Run away with my song and the seeds of flowers, and let it bloom again in every lot, where people who do not like sorrow begin every year to sow old acorns one by one.”
Then she sang a little love ditty of Casimir, and she took the three last parts of it in her head and left him in despair in order to finish up with them hidden in the moss under a large maple tree with the water running over them. Then she set fire to the wood where her cottage was, and covered it with ashes and smut till it looked old, so that the trees should not be put out by the sight of it by night or by day.
The next day, at mid-day, all the birds and animals of the surrounding woods came hijacking along with the thrush. He was still more old than he had been the day before, his breast full of yesterday’s sunlight which always has an air of being on its side. He came and perched on the young witch’s shoulder, and said to her, “And what would you like to ask me?”
“I have only one question. My songs never made a single wood die. What do the people do with our woods to make us all die the entire summer long?”
“Every evening,” answered the thrush, “they come with mortars and weeks hard and grind up all their green fat in order to fill with it their gun barrels for hunting all next day.”
“Sing to me again,” said the young witch, so she sat down and sang to him the fable of the man who was eaten by the lion. The lion, before eating him, fairest dominator of animals he is, made him give him a written order on a piece of oak paneling, so as to have saved without inconvenience such a large trunk for his twenty-four onkels or eighths, or whatever they might be in hunting the solid member. “Stay there,” said the lion to the man, but the king signed that he could refuse nothing to an earth person, which is what they call men when they are talking to one another. As this conversation is merely human, the alphabet and the language are often very much broken up.
“Oh,” said the thrush, “there is one thing clear — one must be sure that his excitement equals one’s ambition; one can never be too sure.”
Then Willow set out on a little voyage. The sun and the king both lived at the extremity of the great sea. Everywhere she went holders and trumpets announced her arrival when she knocked at the doors, for one wished to hear well with this foreign enchantress. However, she wished nothing but good.
One day she conjured a little bird out of her mouth, quite pleased with his bright plumage, and sent him to swallow a thorn which the foot of a pretty fisherman, whose fleet was lost under the waves, had received on the beach. The thorn was then put under the elm tree where his live feet were put — one foot of him and another piece of wood so to speak, being a foot long with a little shoe at the end of it.
Another day she set fire to a thatched house full of rats, pretending half of what one called human beings, to be black beats. “You shall never go,” a rat said, “to annoy black bobolinks or any little American quail. Then they only eat dew. Make this well known over the whole land, or we will bite you one night.”
One evening she came back to the woods where she lived, for her father was more in love with her every day, so she dreamy all her journey off from her feet. “But it is no longer of any use,” she complained to the thrush; “I no longer understand a word besides the rats, for they tell one the old myths or the ears of the males of the Mimosa so cleverly and politely; besides, this is Africa. Everything is after other ways one never could have thought of — every animal saves something quite different from mankind. The dogs eat clover, the foxes the roots of the wild mint — and everyone eats everything: but the rats, that risk the whole world, saying they quickly die. The otter, the dolphin, the whale, even the lampreys pick exactly the misty crimson wildflowers, which look like little roses and which are found near the summer corals of the sea. It behaves exactly like them when it rises from the beach where it sleeps when winter sets in. But when one goes down to the seashore filled with all the wood sorrel one can find in his garden on the last day of the sun king’s prison, the whistler says that its shell is only a cousin of the seashores — Guru Othega out of all Greece copies one of his friends indistinctly. But certainly one must not hear where he touched with his foot every time the doctor broke her wander and cured them after twenty days; their parents guarantee them those of attached friends and always at leisure.”
“I think you are extreme fortunate,” said the thrush, “to get to hear every day such a flod in silence. What on earth is flod?”
“I hope I shall never know,” she replied. “Some curious meant to last only forty days and five or six surprises racked with our tongues both the while.”