Though by now he had learned enough Elfin to be able to converse in it, and was considering a treatise of Elfin Grammar, he found it difficult to acclimatize himself to a society which had not a vestige of mortal scholarship—except in mathematics: the stargazers astonished him by the dexterity of their calculations, looking at him blankly the while if he spoke of Orion or Cygnus. His previous researches into fairies had not prepared him for this divergence between their values and his. They had a practical knowledge of the world; they also knew it was round; but that was the extent of their knowledge; they knew nothing of its ancient history and celebrated characters and did not care to. They had no more than a loose hearsay acquaintance with their own history, and were satisfied to be without any written record of it, since they attached no importance to what might be learned from a book and were amused by the mortal dependence on pen and paper. It was this that blighted his project of the Elfin Grammar. They were not unfriendly to it, and when he explained the laboriousness of inscribing it on tables of stone (another allusion lost on them) a party of working fairies was dispatched to steal a load of paper, while others compounded ink and collected goose quills. But the Grammar was never written, because the load of paper was stolen from a cooked-meats shop, and consisted of a manuscript cantata soaked in grease.

It was also disconcerting when a fairy he was talking to became invisible.