but on one side of every palace there must be a wood. And there
was a very grand wood indeed beside the palace of the king who was
going to be Daylight's father; such a grand wood, that nobody yet
had ever got to the other end of it. Near the house it was kept
very trim and nice, and it was free of brushwood for a long way in;
but by degrees it got wild, and it grew wilder, and wilder, and wilder,
until some said wild beasts at last did what they liked in it.
The king and his courtiers often hunted, however, and this kept the wild
beasts far away from the palace.

One glorious summer morning, when the wind and sun were out together,
when the vanes were flashing and the flags frolicking against
the blue sky, little Daylight made her appearance from somewhere--
nobody could tell where--a beautiful baby, with such bright eyes
that she might have come from the sun, only by and by she showed such
lively ways that she might equally well have come out of the wind.
There was great jubilation in the palace, for this was the first baby
the queen had had, and there is as much happiness over a new baby
in a palace as in a cottage.

But there is one disadvantage of living near a wood: you do not know
quite who your neighbours may be. Everybody knew there were in it
several fairies, living within a few miles of the palace, who always
had had something to do with each new baby that came; for fairies live
so much longer than we, that they can have business with a good many
generations of human mortals. The curious houses they lived in were
well known also,--one, a hollow oak; another, a birch-tree, though
nobody could ever find how that fairy made a house of it; another, a hut
of growing trees intertwined, and patched up with turf and moss.
But there was another fairy who had lately come to the place,