ill. The children arrive, and in the end capture a number of blue birds

behind one of the doors to which Night holds the key. But as soon as the company have escaped from the Palace of Night, the birds are seen to be dead. Like the roses in the cavern in _Alladine and Palomides_, they could not live in the light of day.

They reach the enchanted palaces where all men's joys, all men's happinesses are gathered together in the charge of Fate. First they meet the Luxuries of the Earth, bloated revellers whose banqueting-hall is separated from the cavern of the Miseries only by a thin curtain. The Blue Bird is not here. Next they interview the Happinesses (the Happiness of Home, the Happiness of Being Well, etc.) and the Great Joys (the Joy of Maternal Love, the Joy of Understanding, etc.). In the end they arrive at the Kingdom of the Future, an Azure Palace pretty high up in the clouds. Here all unborn children, enough to last to the end of the world, more than thirty thousand, are awaiting the hour of their birth. When the fathers and mothers want children, Father Time throws back the opalescent doors which open upon the quays of the Dawn, and ships the babies off in a galley with White and gold sails; then are heard the sounds of the earth like a distant music, and the song of the mothers coming out to meet their children. Gliding about among the children are taller figures, "clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure, figures of a sovereign and silent beauty"--the race which shall inhabit the earth when man has made way for his offspring the superman. The babes unborn are pondering, while they wait:

"some little plan or chart, Some fragment from their dream of human life,"

the inventions they are to make, the happiness they are to confer, the crimes they are to commit. Of a sudden Father Time discovers the children, and comes towards them in a fury, asking them why they are not blue; but Light tells the boy to turn the magic diamond which has preserved them thus far, and she has just time to whisper that she has got the blue bird, when down goes the curtain.