TWILIGHT LAND

growing things. The Ingh-road was grey, and the trees
were dark,

I drifled along the road as a soap-bubble floats before the
wind, or as a body floats in a dream. I floated along and I
floated along past the trees, past the bushes, past the mull-
pond, past the mill where the old miller stood at the door
looking at me.

I floated on, and there was the Inn, and it was the Sign of
Mother Goose.

The sign hung on a pole, and on it was painted a picture
of Mother Goose with her grey gander.

It was to the Inn I wished to come.

L floated on, and I would have floated past the Inn, and
perhaps have gotten into the Land of Never-Come-Back-
Again, only I caught at the branch of an apple-tree, and so
L slopped myself, though the COE eae came falling
down like pink and white snowflakes.

The earth and the air and the sky were all still, just as it
is at twilight, and I heard them laughing and talking in the
tap-room of the Inn of the Sign of Mother Goose—the
clinking of glasses, and the rattling and clatter of knives and
forks and plates and dishes. That was where I wished
to go.

So in I went. Mother Goose herself opened the door, and
there I was.

The room was all full of twilight; but there they sat,
every one of them. I did not count them, but there were ever
so many: Aladdin, and Ali Baba, and Fortunatis, and
JSack-the- Ganeiaie: and Doctor Faustus, and Bidpai, and
Cinderella, and Puen Grizzle, and the Soldier who cheated
the Devil, and St. George, and Hans in Luck, who traded
and traded his lump of gold until he had only an empty

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