midnight
Various quite pleasant happenings are recorded to her credit . The White Ladies belonged to the `` good people , '' and , on the whole , lived up to their reputation . But in Malvina , side by side with much that is commendable , there appears to have existed a most reprehensible spirit of mischief , displaying itself in pranks that , excusable , or at all events understandable , in , say , a pixy or a pigwidgeon , strike one as altogether unworthy of a well-principled White Lady , posing as the friend and benefactress of mankind . For merely refusing to dance with her -- at midnight , by the shores of a mountain lake ; neither the time nor the place calculated to appeal to an elderly gentleman , suffering possibly from rheumatism -- she on one occasion transformed an eminently respectable proprietor of tin mines into a nightingale , necessitating a change of habits that to a business man must have been singularly irritating . On another occasion a quite important queen , having had the misfortune to quarrel with Malvina over some absurd point of etiquette in connection with a lizard , seems , on waking the next morning , to have found herself changed into what one judges , from the somewhat vague description afforded by the ancient chroniclers , to have been a sort of vegetable marrow . Such changes , according to the Professor , who is prepared to maintain that evidence of an historical nature exists sufficient to prove that the White Ladies formed at one time an actual living community , must be taken in an allegorical sense . Just as modern lunatics believe themselves to be china vases or poll-parrots , and think and behave as such , so it must have been easy , the Professor argues , for beings of superior intelligence to have exerted hypnotic influence upon the superstitious savages by whom they were surrounded , and who , intellectually considered , could have been little more than children .