Chattering and laughing and playing glad tricks innumerable at first, the moment they saw I was going to sleep, they became still as judges.
I woke: a sudden musical uproar greeted the opening of my eyes.
We were travelling through the forest in which they found the babies, and which, as I had suspected, stretched all the way from the valley to the hot stream.
A tiny girl sat with her little feet close to my face, and looked down at me coaxingly for a while, then spoke, the rest seeming to hang on her words.
"We make a petisson to king," she said.
"What is it, my darling ?" I asked.
"Shut eyes one minute," she answered.
"Certainly I will! Here goes!" I replied, and shut my eyes close.
"No, no! not fore I tell oo!" she cried.
I opened them again, and we talked and laughed together for quite another hour.
"Close eyes!" she said suddenly.
I closed my eyes, and kept them close.

The elephants stood still.

I heard a soft scurry, a little rustle, and then a silence--for in that world SOME silences ARE heard.
"Open eyes!" twenty voices a little way off shouted at once; but when I obeyed, not a creature was visible except the elephants that bore me.
I knew the children marvellously quick in getting out of the way--the giants had taught them that; but when I raised myself, and looking about in the open shrubless forest, could descry neither hand nor heel, I stared in "blank astonishment." The sun was set, and it was fast getting dark, yet presently a multitude of birds began to sing.

I lay down to listen, pretty sure that, if I left them alone, the hiders would soon come out again.
The singing grew to a little storm of bird-voices.

"Surely the children must have something to do with it!--And yet how could they set the birds singing ?" I said to myself as I lay and listened.