One is always disconcerted by the ease with which foreigners talk their native tongue. The speech he heard resembled no civilized mortal language; slurred and full of hushed hisses, it was more like some dialect of Gaelic; but though he listened, hoping to catch a word which would put him on the track of what they were talking about, all he knew was that some proposal had been made and accepted. They gathered into a circle, sat down on the floor, and began to sing, softly clapping their hands to mark the measure. It was a wandering melody, a melody of no enterprise, but it must have had some charm for them, and the words, perhaps, some rustic association, for why else should these well-dressed persons sit in a ring on the floor, like peasants in a hayfield? Or were they rehearsing a masque? He had got the tune by heart and learned nothing of the words when there was a brisk tooting of trumpets. All rose to their feet. In came the trumpeters—two children, bright as parakeets in their gold—laced uniforms. The Queen followed. She was small—not taller than her trumpeters—cat-faced, and carried a knitting bag on her arm. She acknowledged her court by a ceremonious inattentive curtsy, and beckoned to a fairy who was obviously a person of importance. He hurried forward, bowing deeply, and knelt before her, holding out his hands. She looped a skein of wool over them, wound it into a ball, dropped another curtsy, more of a bob this time, and withdrew, followed by her trumpeters, whose gold-laced demeanour contrasted with her air of modest simplicity.

He was still smiling over the trumpeters when another music began—a sort of Turkish march, played by two fiddlers and a drummer. By degrees, everyone was dancing: here a minuet, there a reel, there a prancing hornpipe. It seemed they danced as the fancy took them, with little regard to the music, till with a rap on the drum it quickened and commanded them into a circle that gathered and dispersed, gathered and dispersed, faster and faster, whirling by like swallows. He watched till he could watch no more. In the anteroom the match of beggar-my-neighbour was still going on. Burrowing into his fern bed he told himself he must remember all this.