“Those firework fusees, O Crikey!” was Edwin’s first thought.
But it was no firework fusee. It was like glow-worms, only a thousand times more bright and white. For it was the light of pure reason, and it glowed from the glorious eyes of the Arithmetic Fairy. You did not know that there was an Arithmetic Fairy? If you knew as much as I do, it would be simply silly for me to try to tell you stories, wouldn’t it?
Her wonderful eyes gleamed and flashed straight into the round goggling eyes of the amazed Edwin.
“Did no one ever tell you?” the fairy went on, shaking out her dress, which was woven of the integral calculus, and trimmed with a dazzling fringe of logarithms. “Did no one ever tell you that the things that happen when you’ve done your sums right, happen when you’re grown up?”
“I don’t care what happens then,” Edwin dared to say, for the flashing eyes were kind eyes. “I shall be a pirate, or a bushranger, or something.”
The fairy drew herself up, and her graceful garland of simple equations trembled as Edwin breathed heavily.
“A Pirate,” said she, “a nice sort of pirate who can’t calculate his men’s share of the plunder to three-seventeenths of a gold link of the dead captain’s chain! A fine bushranger who can’t arrange the forty-two bullets from the revolvers of his seven dauntless followers so that each of the fifteen enemies gets his fair share! Go along with you!” said the Arithmetic Fairy.
But Edwin’s eyes were, as I said, wide open, goggling.
“I say,” he suddenly remarked, “how jolly pretty you are.”
The Arithmetic Fairy has but one weakness—a feminine weakness. She loves a pretty speech. If blunt, so much the worse; yet even bluntness....
She looked down and played shyly with the bunch of miscellaneous examples in vulgar fractions which adorned her waistband.
“I suppose you can’t be expected to understand, yet,” she said, and she said it very gently.
“When I do things I want something to happen at once. ‘I want a white rabbit and I want it _now_.’”
“Get your Master to set you a little simple multiplication sum in white rabbits,” she said. “Goodbye, my child. You’ll know me better in time, and as you know me better you’ll love me more.”
The Fairy laughed, and spread her dazzling wings glistening with all the glories of the higher mathematics.