There are times of the day and of the weather when the
sky over Fairyland can be clearly perceived, for it has a different colour
from any other kind of sky. That is where Fairyland is. It is not on an
island, as some have pretended, still less is it under the earth--a
ridiculous story, for there it is all dark."
"But how do you get there?" asked the child. "Do you get there by walking
to the hills and going over?"
"No," said I, "that is just the bother of it. Several people have thought
that that was the way of getting there; in fact, it looked plain common
sense, but there is a trick about it; when you get to the hills everything
changes, because the fairies have that power: the hills become ordinary,
the people living on them turn into people just like you and me, and then
when you get to the top of the hills, before you can say knife another
common country just like ours has been stuck on the other side. On this
account, through the power of the fairies, who hate particularly to be
disturbed, no one can reach Fairyland in so simple a way as by walking
towards it."
"Then," said the child to me, "I don't see how any one can get there"--for
this child had good brains and common sense.
"But," said I, "you must have read in stories of people who get to
Fairyland, and I think you will notice that in the stories written by
people who know anything about it (and you know how easily these are
distinguished from the others) there are always two ways of getting to
Fairyland, and only two: one is by mistake, and the other is by a spell.
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