At the Back of the North Wind Illustrated - online book

A Complete Illustrated children's fantasy book by George MacDonald.

Share page

	268 At the Back of the North Wind
	might equally well have come out of the wind. There was great jubilation in the palace, for this was the first baby the queen had had, and there is as much happiness over a new baby in a palace as in a cottage. But there is one disadvantage of living near a wood: you do not know quite who your neighbours may be. Everybody knew there wrere in it several fairies, liv­ing within a few miles of the palace, who always had had something to do with each new baby that came ; for fairies live so much longer than we, that they can have business with a good many gen­erations of human mortals. The curious houses they lived in were well known also,—one, a hollow oak; another, a birch-tree, though nobody could ever find how that fairy made a house of it; another, a hut of growing trees intertwined, and patched up with turf and moss. But there was another fairy who had lately come to the place, and nobody even knew she was a fairy except the other fairies. A wicked old thing she was, always