On one such occasion a moody little fellow sang me a strange crooning song, with a refrain so pathetic that, although unintelligible to me, it caused the tears to run down my face.
This phenomenon made those who saw it regard me with much perplexity.
Then first I bethought myself that I had not once, in that world, looked on water, falling or lying or running.

Plenty there had been in some long vanished age--that was plain enough--but the Little Ones had never seen any before they saw my tears! They had, nevertheless, it seemed, some dim, instinctive perception of their origin; for a very small child went up to the singer, shook his clenched pud in his face, and said something like this: "'Ou skeeze ze juice out of ze good giant's seeberries! Bad giant!" "How is it," I said one day to Lona, as she sat with the baby in her arms at the foot of my tree, "that I never see any children among the giants ?" She stared a little, as if looking in vain for some sense in the question, then replied, "They are giants; there are no little ones." "Have they never any children ?" I asked.
"No; there are never any in the wood for them.

They do not love them.

If they saw ours, they would stamp them." "Is there always the same number of the giants then?
I thought, before I had time to know better, that they were your fathers and mothers." She burst into the merriest laughter, and said, "No, good giant; WE are THEIR firsters." But as she said it, the merriment died out of her, and she looked scared.
I stopped working, and gazed at her, bewildered.
"How CAN that be ?" I exclaimed.
"I do not say; I do not understand," she answered.

"But we were here and they not.