Note 16 — Chapter VII · Triumphs of the Water-world
Reading edition
4. Lastly, it may be said that the fairies being supposed deathless, there would be no reason why they should hurry; and even in case the delay meant a century or two, that makes no perceptible approach to the extravagant scale of time common enough in our fairy tales, when, for instance, they make a man who has whiled ages away in fairyland, deem it only so many minutes16.