The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon Read Free Book Online Page A

wept for these things?’
    â€˜Not I!’ puffed the Porpoise. ‘What! weep for the Sun and the Moon that are nothing but two blobs in the distance? Weep for the world that no one can behold? No, Father! When my dinner is in the distance, I’ll weep for that ; and when I see death coming, I’ll weep for that ; but for the rest, I say pooh!’
    â€˜Well, it takes all sorts of fish to make a sea,’ said King Neptune, and stooping down he picked up the Goldfish and admonished it with his finger.
    â€˜Come, child,’ said he, ‘tears may be the beginning, but they should not be the end of things. Tears will get you nowhere. Do you really wish to marry the Moon, surpass the Sun, and possess the world?’
    â€˜I do, Father, I do!’ quivered the Goldfish.
    â€˜Then since there is no help for it, you must get caught in the net—do you see it floating yonder in the water? Are you afraid of it?’
    â€˜Not if it will bring me all I long for,’ said the Goldfish bravely.
    â€˜Risk all, and you will get your desires,’ promised King Neptune. He let the Goldfish dart through his fingers, and saw him swim boldly to the net which was waiting to catch what it could. As the meshes closed upon him, King Neptune stretched out his hand, and slipped a second fish inside it; and then, stroking his green beard, he continued his stroll among his big and little children.
    And what happened to the Goldfish?
    He was drawn up into the Fisherman’s boat that lay in wait above the net; and in the same cast a Silver Fish was taken, a lovely creature with a round body and silky fins like films of moonlit cloud. ‘There’s a pretty pair!’ thought the Fisherman, and he carried them home to please his little daughter. And to make her pleasure more complete, he first bought a globe of glass, and sprinkled sand and shells and tiny pebbles at the bottom, and set among them a sprig of coral and a strand of seaweed. Then he filled the globe with water, dropped in the Gold and Silver Fishes, and put the little glass world on a table in his cottage window.
    The Goldfish, dazed with joy, swam to wards the Silver Fish, crying, ‘You are the Moon come out of the sky! Oh see, how round the world is!’
    And he looked through one side of the globe, and saw flowers and trees in the garden; and he looked through another side of the globe, and saw on the mantelpiece black and white elephants of ebony and ivory, that the Fisherman had brought from foreign parts; and through another side of the globe he saw on the wall a fan of peacock’s feathers, with eyes of gold and blue and green; and through the fourth side, on a bracket, he saw a little Chinese temple hung with bells. And he looked at the bottom of the globe, and saw his own familiar world of coral, sand, and shells. And he looked at the top of the globe, and saw a man, a woman, and a child smiling down at him over the rim.
    And he gave a little jump of joy, and cried to his Silver Bride:
    â€˜Oh Moonfish, I am greater than the Sun! for I give you, not half, but the whole of the world, the top and the bottom and all the way round, with all the wonders that are in it and beyond it!’
    And King Neptune under the sea, who had ears for all that passed, laughed in his beard and said:
    â€˜It was a shame ever to let such a tiny fellow loose in the vast ocean. He needed a world more suited to his size.’
    And ever since then, the world of the Goldfish has been a globe of glass.

THE CLUMBER PUP

I
    When Joe Jolly’s father died, his fortunes were almost at their lowest ebb. Not quite, for he had at least the chair he sat in. But the hut the Jollys lived in was not theirs; it was lent them, as part wages, by the Lord of the Manor whose wood John Jolly chopped. For the rest, he got three shillings every Friday. Even the axe he chopped with was not Mr Jolly’s own.
    Joe grew up in the woods with little education