50. SHADOW BROOK.

What say you, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Clover, Peri-
winkle?. Would any of you, after hearing this story, be
so foolish as to desire the faculty of changing things to
gold ? ”

‘““T should like,” said Periwinkle, a girl of ten, “to
have the power of turning everything to gold with my
right forefinger; but, with my left forefinger, I should
want the power of changing it back again, if the first
change did not please me. And I know what I would
do, this very afternoon !”’

‘Pray tell me,” said Eustace.

“ Why,” answered Periwinkle, “I would touch every
one of these golden leaves on the trees with my left fore-
finger, and make,them all green again; so that we might
have the summer back at once, with no ugly winter in
the mean time.”

“OQ Periwinkle!” cried Eustace Bright, “there you
are wrong, and would doa great deal of mischief. Were
T Midas, I would make nothing else but just such golden
days as these over and over again, all the year through-
out. My best thoughts always come a little too late.
Why did not I tell you how old King Midas came to
America, and changed the dusky autumn, such as it is
In other countries, into the burnished beauty which it
here puts on? He gilded the leaves of the great volume
of Nature.”

“Cousin Eustace,” said Sweet Fern, a good little boy,
who was always making particular inquiries about. the
precise height of giants and the littleness of fairies, “how
big was Marygold, and how much did she weigh after
she was turned to gold?”