This is a story for children about a puzzled doctor and his patient. Could it be a magic brownie that causing all of the unusual happenings?
A little girl sat sewing and crying on a garden seat. She had fair floating hair, which the breeze blew into her eyes, and between the cloud of hair, and the mist of tears, she could not see her work very clearly. She neither tied up her locks, nor dried her eyes, however; for when one is miserable, one may as well be completely so.
“What is the matter?” said the Doctor, who was a friend of the Rector’s, and came into the garden whenever he pleased.
The Doctor was a tall stout man, with hair as black as crow’s feathers on the top, and grey underneath, and a bushy beard. When young, he had been slim and handsome, with wonderful eyes, which were wonderful still; but that was many years past. He had a great love for children, and this one was a particular friend of his.”What is the matter?” said he.
“I’m in a row,” murmured the young lady through her veil; and the needle went in damp, and came out with a jerk, which is apt to result in what ladies called “puckering.”
“You are like London in a yellow fog,” said the Doctor, throwing himself on to the grass, “and it is very depressing to my feelings. What is the row about, and how came you to get into it?”
“We’re all in it,” was the reply; and apparently the fog was thickening, for the voice grew less and less distinct—”the boys and everybody. It’s all about forgetting, and not putting away, and leaving about, and borrowing, and breaking, and that sort of thing. I’ve had Father’s new pocket-handkerchiefs to hem, and I’ve been out climbing with the boys, and kept forgetting and forgetting, and Mother says I always forget; and I can’t help it. I forget to tidy his newspapers for him, and I forget to feed Puss, and I forgot these; besides, they’re a great bore, and Mother gave them to Nurse to do, and this one was lost, and we found it this morning tossing about in the toy-cupboard.”
“It looks as if it had been taking violent exercise,” said the Doctor. “But what have the boys to do with it?”
“Why, then there was a regular turn out of the toys,” she explained, “and they’re all in a regular mess. You know, we always go on till the last minute, and then things get crammed in anyhow. Mary and I did tidy them once or twice; but the boys never put anything away, you know, so what’s the good?”
“What, indeed!” said the Doctor. “And so you have complained of them?”
“Oh! no!” answered she. “We don’t get them into rows, unless they are very provoking; but some of the things were theirs, so everybody was sent for, and I was sent out to finish this, and they are all tidying. I don’t know when it will be done, for I have all this side to hem; and the soldiers’ box is broken, and Noah is lost out of the Noah’s Ark, and so is one of the elephants and a guinea-pig, and so is the rocking-horse’s nose; and nobody knows what has become of Rutlandshire and the Wash, but they’re so small, I don’t wonder; only North America and Europe are gone too.”
The Doctor started up in affected horror. “Europe gone, did you say? Bless me! what will become of us!”
“Don’t!” said the young lady, kicking petulantly with her dangling feet, and trying not to laugh. “You know I mean the puzzles; and if they were yours, you wouldn’t like it.”
“I don’t half like it as it is,” said the Doctor. “I am seriously alarmed. An earthquake is one thing; you have a good shaking, and settle down again. But Europe gone—lost—Why, here comes Deordie, I declare, looking much more cheerful than we do; let us humbly hope that Europe has been found. At present I feel like Aladdin when his palace had been transported by the magician; I don’t know where I am.”
“You’re here, Doctor; aren’t you?” asked the slow curly-wigged brother, squatting himself on the grass.
“Is Europe found?” said the Doctor tragically.
“Yes,” laughed Deordie. “I found it.”
“You will be a great man,” said the Doctor. “And—it is only common charity to ask—how about North America?”
“Found too,” said Deordie. “But the Wash is completely lost.”
“And my six shirts in it!” said the Doctor. “I sent them last Saturday as ever was. What a world we live in! Any more news? Poor Tiny here has been crying her eyes out.”
“I’m so sorry, Tiny,” said the brother. “But don’t bother about it. It’s all square now, and we’re going to have a new shelf put up.”
“Have you found everything?” asked Tiny.
“Well, not the Wash, you know. And the elephant and the guinea-pig are gone for good; so the other elephant and the other guinea-pig must walk together as a pair now. Noah was among the soldiers, and we have put the cavalry into a night-light box. Europe and North America were behind the book-case; and, would you believe it? the rocking-horse’s nose has turned up in the nursery oven.”
“I can’t believe it,” said the Doctor. “The rocking-horse’s nose couldn’t turn up, it was the purest Grecian, modelled from the Elgin marbles. Perhaps it was the heat that did it, though. However, you seem to have got through your troubles very well, Master Deordie. I wish poor Tiny were at the end of her task.”
“So do I,” said Deordie ruefully. “But I tell you what I’ve been thinking, Doctor. Nurse is always nagging at us, and we’re always in rows of one sort or another, for doing this, and not doing that, and leaving our things about. But, you know, it’s a horrid shame, for there are plenty of servants, and I don’t see why we should be always bothering to do little things, and—”
“Oh! come to the point, please,” said the Doctor; “you do go round the square so, in telling your stories, Deordie. What have you been thinking of?”
“Well,” said Deordie, who was as good-tempered as he was slow, “the other day Nurse shut me up in the back nursery for borrowing her scissors and losing them; but I’d got ‘Grimm’ inside one of my knickerbockers, so when she locked the door, I sat down to read. And I read the story of the Shoemaker and the little Elves who came and did his work for him before he got up; and I thought it would be so jolly if we had some little Elves to do things instead of us.”
“That’s what Tommy Trout said,” observed the Doctor.
“Who’s Tommy Trout?” asked Deordie.
“Don’t you know, Deor?” said Tiny. “It’s the good boy who pulled the cat out of the what’s-his-name.
‘Who pulled her out?
Little Tommy Trout.’
Is it the same Tommy Trout, Doctor? I never heard anything else about him except his pulling the cat out; and I can’t think how he did that.”
“Let down the bucket for her, of course,” said the Doctor. “But listen to me. If you will get that handkerchief done, and take it to your mother with a kiss, and not keep me waiting, I’ll have you all to tea, and tell you the story of Tommy Trout.”
“This very night?” shouted Deordie.
“This very night.”
“Every one of us?” inquired the young gentleman with rapturous incredulity.
“Every one of you.—Now, Tiny, how about that work?”
“It’s just done,” said Tiny.—”Oh! Deordie, climb up behind, and hold back my hair, there’s a darling, while I fasten off. Oh! Deor, you’re pulling my hair out. Don’t.”
“I want to make a pig-tail,” said Deor.
“You can’t,” said Tiny, with feminine contempt. “You can’t plait. What’s the good of asking boys to do anything? There! it’s done at last. Now go and ask Mother if we may go.—Will you let me come, Doctor,” she inquired, “if I do as you said?”
“To be sure I will,” he answered. “Let me look at you. Your eyes are swollen with crying. How can you be such a silly little goose?”
“Did you never cry?” asked Tiny.
“When I was your age? Well, perhaps so.”
“You’ve never cried since, surely,” said Tiny.
The Doctor absolutely blushed.
“What do you think?” said he.
“Oh, of course not,” she answered. “You’ve nothing to cry about. You’re grown up, and you live all alone in a beautiful house, and you do as you like, and never get into rows, or have anybody but yourself to think about; and no nasty pocket-handkerchiefs to hem.”
“Very nice; eh, Deordie?” said the Doctor.
“Awfully jolly,” said Deordie.
“Nothing else to wish for, eh?”
“I should keep harriers, and not a poodle, if I were a man,” said Deordie; “but I suppose you could, if you wanted to.”
“Nothing to cry about, at any rate?”
“I should think not!” said Deordie.—”There’s Mother, though; let’s go and ask her about the tea;” and off they ran.
The Doctor stretched his six feet of length upon the sward, dropped his grey head on a little heap of newly-mown grass, and looked up into the sky.
“Awfully jolly—no nasty pocket-handkerchiefs to hem,” said he, laughing to himself. “Nothing else to wish for; nothing to cry about.”
Nevertheless, he lay still, staring at the sky, till the smile died away, and tears came into his eyes. Fortunately, no one was there to see.
What could this “awfully jolly” Doctor be thinking of to make him cry? He was thinking of a grave-stone in the churchyard close by, and of a story connected with this grave-stone which was known to everybody in the place who was old enough to remember it. This story has nothing to do with the present story, so it ought not to be told.
And yet it has to do with the Doctor, and is very short, so it shall be put in, after all.