My father is weak, but I am strong. I grow stronger every day. I’m like my uncle who is much stronger than my father. My uncle’s son is weak, however. Life is strange!

One day, when I was playing shinny in the field with my brothers and my cousin, I drove a ball too swiftly at the weakling. He cried out that he was sorely hurt, and he went home to his mother.

She hated me after that. She thought I meant to kill her son. She sent me away beyond the four brown boundaries of the world. I came into the care of a wise man named Old Bergen who made me a camp on top of a hill.

Here, the sun always shines, but no man can see me. Not yet.

Manus in The Story of Manus, Orange Fairy Book. Illustration by N.C. Wyeth.