This last consideration settled it. That night, when all were asleep, Adam took his fleam and his vials and his test tubes and a basin and a candle and went to the bedside. There lay the man, talking gently to the bolster. The fleam pierced the vein, the blood spurted out. Adam carried the basin to a corner of the room and set to work. It was poor blood, even for such an old, undernourished man; indeed, it was more than half water. It contained an unaccountable deposit of carbon. It tasted slightly bitter. It was totally unmagnetic. Adam repeated his analysis several times. Either Master Hieronymus of the Rosy Cross was wrong about the transcendental element of magnetic air or the man on the bed was no fairy. Adam now glanced toward the subject of his experiment. He had not plugged the vein sufficiently after the phlebotomy. The bed was soaked in blood. A lagging trickle still flowed from the wound. Ceased. Began again. Ceased. With the last impetus of the heart, a few gouts of blood emerged, till the last of them sealed the wound. So the poor wretch was not a fairy; and the bedding would have to be paid for. But if the body could be got to the anatomists50 in Edinburgh, thought Adam, taking heart again, I shall break about even. He straightened it, put his things together, and went to bed.

2 The Five Black Swans

Portents accompany the death of monarchs. A white horse trots slowly along the avenue, a woman in streaming wet garments is seen to enter the throne room, vanishes, and leaves wet footmarks; red mice are caught in the palace mousetraps. For several weeks five black swans had circled incessantly above the castle of Elfhame. It was ninety decades since their last appearance; then there were four of them, waiting for Maharit, Queen Tiphaine’s predecessor. Now they were five, and waited for Tiphaine. Mute as a shell cast up on the beach, she lay in her chamber watching the antics of her pet monkey.

The mysterious tribe of fairies are erroneously supposed to be immortal and very small. In fact, they are of smallish human stature and of ordinary human contrivance. They are born, and eventually die; but their longevity and their habit of remaining good-looking, slender and unimpaired till the hour of death has led to the Kingdom of Elfin being called the Land of the Ever-Young. Again, it is an error to say ‘the Kingdom of Elfin’: the Kingdoms of Elfin are as numerous as kingdoms were in the Europe of the nineteenth century, and as diverse.