“Is it? Where do you come from? What brings you here?” 

 “Renny brought me here because I love him.” 

 “Love him? Have you ever met before?” 

 “No; but he pulled me out of the water.” 

 “Come—this won’t do. I must know more about you.” 

 She laughed and put out her hand coaxingly. 

 “Shall I tell you? A little, perhaps. I am from a big forest out west there, where wheels drone like hornets among the trees and black men rise out of the ground. I have no father or mother, for I come of the fairies. Those who stood for them married late and had a baby and they delayed to christen it. One day the baby was gone and I was there. They knew me for a changeling from the first and didn’t love me. But I lived with them for all that and they got to hate me more and more. Not a cow died or a gammer was wryed wi’ the rheumatics but I had done it. Bit by bit the old man lost all his trade and loved me none the more, I can tell you. He was a Beast Leech, and where was the use of the forest folk sending for him to mend their sick kine when he kept a changeling to undo it all? At last they could stand no more of it and the woman brought me away and lost me.” 

 “Lost you?” echoed my father. 

 “Oh,” said Zyp, with a little cluck, “I knew all along how the tramp was to end. There was an old one, a woman, lived in the forest, and she told me a deal of things. She knew me better than them all, and I loved her because she was evil, so they said. She told me some rhymes and plenty of other things.” 

 “Well?” said my father. 

 “We walked east by the sun for days and days. Then we came to the top of a big, soft hill, where little beetles were hopping among the grass, and below us was a great town like stones in a green old quarry, and the woman said: ‘Run down and ask the name of it while I rest here.’ And I ran with the wind in my face and was joyful, for I knew that she would escape when I was gone, and I should never see her again.” 

 “And then you tumbled into the water?” said my father. 

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