"Human Tales" from Faerie

Summary: In 1823, in Germany, in Cologne, a puppet maker dreamt a Blue Fairy came to him and joined him backstage behind his puppet theatre :: The Blue Fairy observed the puppet maker's skill in manipulating his carved wooden boys and girls by strings attached to their heads and hands, enacting comic plays on their small wooden stage :: The Blue Fairy was mildly amused with the puppet maker's divertissement and bargained to exchange a real boy for one of the freshly painted wooden boys attached to strings :: After a short time, the real boy returned home to his mistress, the Blue Fairy, on a unicorn and there was a glorious moonlit dance in the woods to celebrate his charming escape :: The puppet maker had been fooled into trading away his own dearly carved wooden boy on strings for a puckish, pixie boy, mistaking him for a human boy. To balance her end of the bargain, the Blue Fairy had altered the puppet maker's cognitive ability to distinguish the difference between madness and dreams... The "real" boy was able to ride away from the human world and back into the woods, laughing and leaving nought more than a wooden shell of his enchanting self... Musique Mécanique par le Théâtre Électrique :: "Dance of the Faerie" by Pyotr Tchaikovsky