Laura Ingalls Wilder 1916
Have you seen any fairies lately? I asked the question of a little girl not long ago. “Hah! There’s no such thing as fairies,” she replied. In some way the answer hurt me, and I have been vaguely disquieted when I have thought of ever since. By the way, have you seen any fairies lately? Please do not answer as the little girl did, for I’m sure there are fairies and that you at least have seen their work.
In the long, long ago days, when the farmers gathered their crops, they always used to leave a part of whatever crop they were harvesting in or on the ground for the use of the “Little People.” This was only fair, for the “Little People” worked hard in the ground to help the farmer grow his crops, and if a share were not left for them, they became angry and the crops would not be good the next year. You may laugh at this as an old superstition, but I leave it to you if it has not been proved true that where the “Little People” of the soul are not fed the crops are poor.
We call them different names now—nitrogen and humus and all the rest of it—but I always have preferred to think of them as fairy folk who must be treated right.
Our agriculture schools and farm papers spend much time and energy telling us to put back into the soil the elements of which we rob it. Only another way of saying, “Don’t rob the ‘Little People’; feed them!”
Dryads used to live in the trees, you know—beautiful fairy creatures who now and then were glimpsed beside the tree into which they vanished. There have been long years during which we have heard nothing of them, but now scientists have discovered that the leaves of trees have eyes, actual eyes that mirror surrounding objects. Of what use are eyes to a tree, I wonder? Would it not be fine if the men of science gave us back all our fairies under different names?
I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic things;
in fairies and all their kin. It is not surprising that when children are grown, they have so little idealism or imagination or that so many of them are like the infidel who asserted that he would not believe anything that he could not see. It was a good retort the Quaker made, “Friend! Does thee believe thee has any brains?”