The Fairy Ring by Mary Losure Read Free Book Online

“Glade of the Iguanodons.” “The Central Lake” showed a sea monster’s head and coils rising above the waves.
    The book was two and a half inches thick and 319 pages long. A slow reader would require quite a bit of time to get through it. Still, it was nice of Sir Arthur to send it to her.
    He had a vivid imagination —
that
much was clear.
    Elsie’s father, too, got a letter from Sir Arthur.
    “I have seen the very interesting photos which your little girl took,” it said. “They are certainly amazing. I was writing a little article for the
Strand
upon the evidence for the existence of fairies, so that I was very much interested. I should naturally like to use the photos, along with other material.”
    “I heard him moan to my Mother,” Elsie wrote in a letter years later, “‘How could a brilliant man like him believe such a thing?’” How could
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
be fooled?
    And to think, her father said, that the great man had been bamboozled by “our Elsie, and she at the bottom of her class.”
    Elsie’s father wrote Sir Arthur back.
    31 Main Street
    Cottingley, Bingley
    July 12, 1920
    Dear Sir,
    I hope you will forgive us for not answering your letter sooner and thanking you for the beautiful book you so kindly sent to Elsie. She is delighted with it. I can assure you we do appreciate the honour you have done her. The book came last Saturday morning an hour after we had left for the seaside for our holidays, so we did not receive it until last night. We received a letter from Mr. Gardner at the same time, and he proposes coming to see us at the end of July. Would it be too long to wait until then, when we could explain what we know about it?
    Yours very gratefully,
    Arthur Wright
    In his letter, Sir Arthur had asked if he or Mr. Gardner might run up to Cottingley and have a little chat with the girls. Elsie’s father’s reply —
“Mr. Gardner . . . proposes coming to see us at the end of July. Would it be too long to wait until then?”
— very politely hinted that it would be best if Sir Arthur didn’t come.
    So Elsie’s father never met his hero.
    But one afternoon in late July, Elsie’s mother opened their front door to a quiet middle-aged man in a brown suit and a bow tie.
    Elsie’s mother showed Mr. Gardner into the parlor and introduced Elsie. (Mr. Gardner remembered her later as “a shy, pretty girl of about sixteen.”) The three of them made conversation until Elsie’s father came home from work and they all had tea.
    Mr. Gardner asked Elsie’s father to tell his part of the story. Elsie’s father said he’d put just one plate in the camera, given it to Elsie and Frances, and then developed the pictures as soon as they came back.
    Elsie’s mother told Mr. Gardner she remembered quite well that the two girls were gone from the house only a short time.
    Mr. Gardner examined Elsie’s hand — some critics of the gnome picture had said Elsie’s hand looked suspiciously large. “She laughingly made me promise not to say much about it, it is so very long!” he wrote later. Mr. Gardner traced the outline of Elsie’s hand on a piece of paper, for evidence.
    And then, after tea, Elsie and Mr. Gardner went down to the beck. “I was glad of the opportunity of questioning the elder girl quietly by herself and of talking things over,” Mr. Gardner wrote later.
    Mr. Gardner looked at the waterfall and the nearby toadstools. He took his own photographs of the exact spots where the fairy photos were taken. He asked Elsie what color the fairies were.
    Elsie told him they were “the palest of green, pink, mauve,” he wrote later. “Much more in the wings than in the bodies, which are very pale to white.” The gnome, she told him, seemed to be wearing black tights, a reddish-brown jersey, and a red pointed cap.
    Elsie explained that she couldn’t entice them in, since she had no power of her own over the fairies. The way to get them to come close, she said, was to just sit