The Borrowers Afield by Mary Norton Read Free Book Online

brightening. "Where's the candle, Pod?"
    "It's here," said Pod. "Give me a match, Arrietty, and a medium-sized aspirin lid. We got to go careful with the tea, you know: we got to go careful with everything."
    Homily put out a finger and touched the worn leather. "I'll give this boot a good clean-out in the morning," she said.
    "It's not bad," said Pod, taking out the half nail scissor. "If you ask me, we been lucky to find a boot like this. There ain't nothing to worry about: it's disinfected, all right—what with the sun and the wind and the rain year after year of it." He stuck the blade of the nail scissor through an eyelet hole and lashed it firm with a bit of old bootlace.
    "What are you doing that for, Papa?" asked Arrietty.
    "To stand the lid on, of course," said Pod. "A kind of bracket over the candle: we haven't got no tripod. Now you go and fill it with water, there's a good girl—there's plenty outside..."
    There was plenty outside: it was coming down in torrents; but the mouth of the boot faced out of the wind and there was a little dry patch before it. Arrietty filled the tin lid quite easily by tipping a large pointed fox-glove leaf toward it so the rain ran off and down the point. All about her was the steady sound of rain and the lighted candle within the boot made the dusk seem darker. There was a smell of wildness, of space, of leaves and grasses and, as she turned away with the filled tin lid, another smell—wine-y, fragrant, spicy. Arrietty took note of it to remember it for morning—it was the smell of wild strawberries.
    After they had drunk their hot tea and eaten a good half of sweet, crumbly digestive biscuit, they took off their wet outer clothes and hung them out along the handle of the nail scissor above the candle. Huddled together, with the old woolen sock about their shoulders, they talked a little. "Funny," Arrietty remarked, "to be wrapped in a sock and inside a boot." But Pod, watching the candle flame, was worried about wastage and, when the clothes had steamed a little, he doused the flame. Tired out, they lay down at last among the borrowing-bags, cuddled together for warmth. The last sound Arrietty heard as she fell asleep was the steady drumming of the rain on the hollow leather of the boot.

Chapter Six
"Such is the tree, such is the fruit."
End of great railways strike at Peoria., Ill, 1891
[Extract from Arrietty's Diary and
Proverb Book, August 26th]
    A RRIETTY was the first to wake. "Where am I? " she wondered. She felt warm—too warm, lying there between her mother and father—and when she turned her head slightly she saw three little golden suns, floating in the darkness. It was a second or two before she realized what they were, and with this knowledge memory flooded back—all that happened yesterday: the escape, the frenzied scramble across the orchard, the weary climb, the rain. The little golden suns, she realized, were the lace-holes of the boot!
    Stealthily Arrietty sat up: a balmy freshness stole in upon her and, framed in the neck of the boot, she saw the bright day: grasses, softly stirring, tenderly sunlit. Some were broken, where yesterday they had pushed through them dragging the borrowing-bags. There was a yellow buttercup—sticky and gleaming, it looked, like wet paint. On a tawny stalk of sorrel, she saw an aphis—of a green so delicate that, against the sunlight, it looked transparent. "Ants milk them," Arrietty remembered, "perhaps we could."
    She slid out from between her sleeping parents and just as she was, with bare feet and in her vest and petticoat, she ventured out-of-doors.
    It was a glorious day: sunlit and rain-washed—the earth breathing out its scents. "This," Arrietty thought, "is what I have longed for; what I have imagined: what I knew existed—what I knew we'd have!"
    She pushed through the grasses and soft drops of water fell on her benignly, warmed by the sun. Downhill a little way she went, toward the hedge, out of the jungle of higher