that was good for taking pictures of fairies. But by afternoon it cleared.
Aunt Polly went to have tea with Aunt Clara so that Frances and Elsie could be alone. “I . . . left them to it,” she later wrote Mr. Gardner.
Elsie and Frances put on dresses trimmed with lace and ruffles, tied a big white bow in Frances’s hair, and went down the path to the beck.
They stuck Elsie’s painted fairy to a branch. Elsie put her head down near, so it looked as though the fairy were offering her the bouquet.
Frances measured the distance the camera should be from Elsie. The two girls agreed on a shutter speed, Frances pushed the shutter, and “the deed was done,” Frances wrote later.
Elsie and the harebell fairy
Next, they went to Frances’s willow tree. They stuck Frances’s leaping fairy onto one of its branches. The light was dim, which meant they would have to set the shutter to stay open for a long time. Frances stood so her face was in profile with the fairy’s little knee just a few inches from her nose. She looked at the slip of paper in a friendly sort of way and kept her head quite still, so the image would not be blurred.
Elsie pulled the lever, and that was that.
Frances and the leaping fairy
“We wandered home, taking our time,” Frances wrote later. “We saw the baby frogs were no longer babies, the blackberries were still green but after the rain were beginning to fatten. I had no feeling of regret that I would not be there to pick and eat them, nor even that after this week my little men would be in my past.”
Uncle Arthur took the camera and disappeared into his darkroom. When he emerged with the photographs, Aunt Polly was disappointed to see that there were only two.
After that, it rained, and Elsie and Frances said they couldn’t take fairy pictures in the rain.
Aunt Polly told them they were very ungrateful. She’d written to Mr. Gardner telling him how excited Elsie was to have the camera and what a handsome present it was, and now all they had to show for
six dozen
plates were two pictures?
It would not do.
But day after day, it kept raining.
On the afternoon of the last day of Frances’s visit, Aunt Polly sent them out of the house, rain or no rain. Then she and Uncle Arthur went out with some friends for a drive in the countryside and locked the door behind them. They would be gone all afternoon.
“The weather was gloomy and we were gloomy,” Frances remembered later. “It was a hopeless task.”
In their raincoats, Frances and Elsie wandered down the garden path and into the beck. Frances caught a glimpse of little men, but they were off in the distance.
After a while, she and Elsie climbed up the banks to the high ground around the beck, the place where once (very long ago now) Elsie had taken the gnome picture. They wandered toward a little grove of trees and sat down.
They both agreed that if anyone wanted them to take more photos next year, they would say no.
Not far from them lay a little tangle of grass and leaves with drops of rainwater clinging to it. It didn’t look like much more than an old bird’s nest.
Afterward, they couldn’t agree which one of them took a picture of it, but neither of them thought it looked like much at the time. It was probably just a waste of a plate.
Then they wandered on home.
By the time Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur returned, it was too late to develop the plate — Uncle Arthur needed daylight, shining through the darkroom’s red windowpane. It wasn’t until the next day that Aunt Polly found out that the girls had taken only one picture.
“It’s a queer one, we can’t make it out,” she wrote to Mr. Gardner.
In a letter Elsie wrote years later, she said that all that she and Frances could see when they looked at the photograph were “faded-out bits showing of wings and faces here and there . . . bits of dead leaves (that could have been wings) or shadows (that might have been faces).”
Aunt Polly didn’t tell Mr.