“‘A Fairy tale, by William Churne of Staffordshire!’ And who may he be? I am sure I never heard of him before.”

“Say you so, gentle Reader? Well, perhaps, after all, there is nothing very extraordinary in the fact that a man who was born some two hundred and fifty years ago should be forgotten. Well I wot that William Churne is not the only one who is in that predicament. xiiAnd yet my name has had a better chance of being remembered than that of many of my cotemporaries, who, in their day, were more illustrious than ever I was; for it has been wedded, look you, to immortal verse. Doctor Corbet, Bishop of Norwich,—‘the wittie Bishop,’ as King James the First was wont to call him—conferred on me the title of Registrar-General to the Fairies. Have you never read his ‘Fairies’ Farewell’? They say, indeed, that his poems, like many better things, are little read now-a-days; but you will find it among the ballads collected by a congenial spirit (a prelate likewise), Bishop Percy of Dromore. His ‘Reliques of Ancient Poetry,’ you are surely conversant withal? But stay, I see you have forgotten the passage, which my vanity, perhaps, has preserved in my memory for so many years. Thus, then, Richard Corbet xiiispeaks of me in connection with those merry elves, whom he supposes to have taken their final farewell of that land, which, since their presence was withdrawn, has deserved the name of merry England no longer:—
‘Now, they have left our quarters;
A registrar they have,
Who can preserve their charters;
A man both wise and grave.
An hundred of their merry pranks
By one that I could name,
Are kept in store; con twenty thanks
To William for the same.
‘To William Churne, of Staffordshire,
Give laud and praises due,
Who, every meale, can mend your cheare
With tales both old and true;
To William all give audience,
And pray ye for his noddle,
For all the Fairies’ evidence
Were lost if it were addle.’

There, gentle reader, that was the way in which the Bishop-Poet spake of me. I warrant you, my cheeks tingle still as I repeat the lines.”

xiv“Indeed? cheeks that blushed for the first time two centuries and a half ago, must, I should think, have nearly blushed their last by this time. I cannot read your riddle. You would not have us believe, would you, that a man who was born in the sixteenth century, was story-telling in the nineteenth? I fear you must be story-telling in more senses than one, or else that the event so much deprecated by the Bishop of Norwich, hath befallen you, and that the ‘noddle’ is ‘addle.’”

“Ah, gentle reader, is it even so? Can you think of no other solution of the difficulty? I fear me that you have a larger share of the unbelief of this dull, plodding, unimaginative, money-getting, money-loving nineteenth century, than of the humour, and simplicity, and romance of the seventeenth.”

“Come then, I will hazard a solution. xvWhat if the fairies, whose official ............