All this she did until it came to milking the cow. But Cherry saw no cow and was calling “Pruit! Pruit! Pruit!” when out she came from among the trees as if from nowhere. All day, but it was easy work, she scalded milk, made butter, cleaned platters and bowls with water and sand, picked the fruit, weeded the garden. Sometimes the man kissed her for her pains.
A year passed. Aunt Prudence was sent away because she took Cherry into one of the forbidden rooms, where the floor was like glass and it was full of people turned to stone. Sometimes the master went away and left Cherry alone with the child.
The ointment was still a puzzle--but surely it made the child’s eyes see many things! So one day she anointed her own eyes with it. It burned her painfully, and running to the spring to wash it away she learned its power. For there, at the bottom of the water, was a world of little people at play and among them her master; and looking up she saw that the branches of the trees and the flowers and the grass were crowded with the same joyous people. Another day she looked through the keyhole of one of the forbidden rooms and saw her master there, and many ladies too, all singing, and one of these who looked like a queen he kissed. So when, as they were fruit gathering some time afterwards, the master leaned forward to kiss her, she struck him on the face, saying, that he might kiss the small people under the water. Next morning very early he called her from her bed, led her by the light of a lantern up the dark lane for a long way, and then disappeared, after telling her that at times she would still be able to see him on the hills; and when she had recovered from her sorrow she went home.
The first steep cornfield under the edge of the red moor lay all rough and warm with stubble in the evening light. The corn sheaves themselves were of a shining gold and leaned together in shocks that made long, low tents and invited the wayfarer to shelter and sleep. We had come over the moor for hours and this field was the beginning of a deep valley that stretched to the sea. Yonder was the sea, ten miles away, with a row of lights running out upon a nose of land far into it. The valley held one village half way towards the sea and several white farmhouses which sent the smoke of supper to explore the neighbouring ash trees.