MOPSA LEARNS HER LETTERS
[Illustration: THE CRAKEN.]
“A----apple-pie.
B----bit it.”
“How ashamed I am,” Jack said, “to think that you don’t know even your
letters!”
Mopsa replied that she thought that did not signify, and then she and
Jack began to play at jumping from the boat on to the bank, and back
again; and afterwards, as not a single fairy could be seen, they had
breakfast with the apple-woman.
“Where is the Queen?” asked Jack.
The apple-woman answered, “It’s not the fashion to ask questions in
Fairyland.”
“That’s a pity,” said Jack, “for there are several things that I
particularly want to know about this country. Mayn’t I even ask how big
it is?”
“How big?” said Mopsa--little Mopsa looking as wise as possible. “Why,
the same size as your world, of course.”
Jack laughed. “It’s the same world that you call yours,” continued
Mopsa; “and when I’m a little older, I’ll explain it all to you.”
“If it’s our world,” said Jack, “why are none of us in it, excepting me
and the apple-woman?”
“That’s because you’ve got something in your world that you call TIME,”
said Mopsa; “so you talk about NOW, and you talk about THEN.”
“And don’t you?” asked Jack.
“I do if I want to make you understand,” said Mopsa.
The apple-woman laughed, and said, “To think of the pretty thing
talking so queenlike already! Yes, that’s right, and just what the
grown-up fairies say. Go on, and explain it to him if you can.”
“You know,” said Mopsa, “that your people say there was a time when
there were none of them in the world--a time before they were made.
Well, THIS is that time. This is long ago.”
“Nonsense!” said Jack. “Then how do I happen to be here?”
“Because,” said Mopsa, “when the albatross brought you, she did not fly
with you a long way off, but a long way back--hundreds and hundreds of
years. This is your world, as you can see; but none of your people are
here, because they are not made yet. I don’t think any of them will be
made for a thousand years.”
“But I saw the old ships,” answered Jack, “in the enchanted bay.”
“That was a border country,” said Mopsa. “I was asleep while you went
through those countries; but these are the real Fairylands.”
Jack was very much surprised when he heard Mopsa say these strange
things; and as he looked at her, he felt that a sleep was coming over
him, and he could not hold up his head. He felt how delightful it was
to go to sleep; and though the apple-woman sprang to him, when she
observed that he was shutting his eyes, and though he heard her begging
and entreating him to keep awake, he did not want to do so; but he let
his head sink down on the mossy grass, which was as soft as a pillow,
and there under the shade of a Guelder rose-tree, that kept dropping
its white flowrets all over him, he had this dream.
He thought that Mopsa came running up to him, as he stood by the river,
and that he said to her, “Oh, Mopsa, how old we are! We have lived back
to the times before Adam and Eve!”
“Yes,” said Mopsa; “but I don’t feel old. Let us go down the river, and
see what we can find.”
So they got into the boat, and it floated into the middle of the river,
and then made for the opposite bank, where the water was warm and very
muddy, and the river became so very wide that it seemed to be afternoon
when they got near enough to see it clearly; and what they saw was a
boggy country, green, and full of little rills, but the water--which,
as I told you, was thick and muddy--the water was full of small holes!
YOU never saw water with eyelet-holes in it; but Jack did. On all sides
of the boat he saw holes moving about in pairs, and some were so close
that he looked and saw their lining; they were lined with pink, and
they snorted! Jack was afraid, but he considered that this was such a
long time ago that the holes, whatever they were, could not hurt him;
but it made him start, notwithstanding, when a huge flat head reared
itself up close to the boat, and he found that the holes were the
nostrils of creatures who kept all the rest of themselves under water.
In a minute or two, hundreds of ugly flat-heads popped up, and the boat
danced among them as they floundered about in the water.
“I hope they won’t upset us,” said Jack. “I wish you would land.”
Mopsa said she would rather not, because she did not like the hairy
elephants.
“There are no such things as hairy elephants,” said Jack, in his dream;
but he had hardly spoken when out of a wood close at hand some huge
creatures, far larger than our elephants, came jogging down to the
water. There were forty or fifty of them, and they were covered with
what looked like tow. In fact, so coarse was their shaggy hair that
they looked as if they were dressed in door-mats; and when they stood
still and shook themselves, such clouds of dust flew out that, as it
swept over the river, it almost stifled Jack and Mopsa.
“Odious!” exclaimed Jack, sneezing. “What terrible creatures these are!”
“Well,” answered Mopsa, at the other end of the boat (but he could
hardly see her for the dust), “then why do you dream of them?”
Jack had just decided to dream of something else, when, with a noise
greater than fifty trumpets, the elephants, having shaken out all the
dust, came thundering down to the water to bathe in the liquid mud.
They shook the whole country as they plunged; but that was not all. The
awful river-horses rose up, and, with shrill screams, fell upon them,
and gave them battle; while up from every rill peeped above the rushes
frogs as large as oxen, and with blue and green eyes that gleamed like
the eyes of cats.
[Illustration: “THE AWFUL RIVER-HORSES ROSE UP AND, WITH SHRILL SCREAMS,
FELL UPON THEM.”]
The frogs’ croaking, and the shrill trumpeting of the elephants,
together with the cries of the river-horses, as all these creatures
fought with horn and tusk, and fell on one another, lashing the water
into whirlpools, among which the boat danced up and down like a
cork--the blinding spray, and the flapping about of great bats over the
boat and in it--so confused Jack that Mopsa had spoken to him several
times before he answered.
“O Jack!” she said at last; “if you can’t dream any better, I must call
the Craken.”
“Very well,” said Jack. “I’m almost wrapped up and smothered in bats’
wings, so call anything you please.”
Thereupon Mopsa whistled softly, and in a minute or two he saw, almost
spanning the river, a hundred yards off, a thing like a rainbow, or a
slender bridge, or still more, like one ring or coil of an enormous
serpent; and presently the creature’s head shot up like a fountain,
close to the boat, almost as high as a ship’s mast. It was the Craken;
and when Mopsa saw it, she began to cry, and said, “We are caught
in this crowd of creatures, and we cannot get away from the land of
dreams. Do help us, Craken.”
Some of the bats that hung to the edges of the boat had wings as large
as sails, and the first thing the Craken did was to stoop its lithe
neck, pick two or three of them off, and eat them.
“You can swim your boat home under my coils where the water is calm,”
the Craken said, “for she is so extremely old now, that if you do not
take care she will drop to pieces before you get back to the present
time.”
Jack knew it was of no use saying anything to this formidable creature,
before whom the river-horses and the elephants were rushing to the
shore; but when he looked and saw down the river rainbow behind
rainbow--I mean coil behind coil--glittering in the sun, like so many
glorious arches that did not reach to the banks, he felt extremely glad
that this was a dream, and besides that, he thought to himself, “It’s
only a fabled monster.”
“No, it’s only a fable to these times,” said Mopsa, answering his
thought; “but in spite of that we shall have to go through all the
rings.”
They went under one--silver, green, and blue, and gold. The water
dripped from it upon them, and the boat trembled, either because of its
great age, or because it felt the rest of the coil underneath.
A good way off was another coil, and they went so safely under that,
that Jack felt himself getting used to Crakens, and not afraid. Then
they went under thirteen more. These kept getting nearer and nearer
together, but, besides that, the fourteenth had not quite such a high
span as the former ones; but there were a great many to come, and yet
they got lower and lower.
Both Jack and Mopsa noticed this, but neither said a word. The
thirtieth coil brushed Jack’s cap off, then they had to stoop to
pass under the two next, and then they had to lie down in the bottom
of the boat, and they got through with the greatest difficulty; but
still before them was another! The boat was driving straight towards
it, and it lay so close to the water that the arch it made was only a
foot high. When Jack saw it, he called out, “No! that I cannot bear.
Somebody else may do the rest of this dream. I shall jump overboard!”
Mopsa seemed to answer in quite a pleasant voice, as if she was not
afraid:
“No, you’d much better wake.” And then she went on, “Jack! Jack! why
don’t you wake?”
Then all on a sudden Jack opened his eyes, and found that he was lying
quietly on the grass, that little Mopsa really had asked him why he did
not wake. He saw the Queen too, standing by, looking at him, and saying
to herself, “I did not put him to sleep. _I_ did not put him to sleep.”
“We don’t want any more stories to-day, Queen,” said the apple-woman,
in a disrespectful tone, and she immediately began to sing, clattering
some tea-things all the time, for a kettle was boiling on some sticks,
and she was going to make tea out of doors:
“The marten flew to the finch’s nest,
Feathers, and moss, and a wisp of hay:
‘The arrow it sped to thy brown mate’s breast;
Low in the broom is thy mate to-day.’
“‘Liest thou low, love? low in the broom?
Feathers and moss, and a wisp of hay,
Warm the white eggs till I learn his doom.’
She beateth her wings, and away, away.
“‘Ah, my sweet singer, thy days are told
(Feathers and moss, and a wisp of hay)!
Thine eyes are dim, and the eggs grow cold.
O mournful morrow! O dark to-day!’
“The finch flew back to her cold, cold nest,
Feathers and moss, and a wisp of hay.
Mine is the trouble that rent her breast,
And home is silent, and love is clay.”
Jack felt very tired indeed--as much tired as if he had really been out
all day on the river, and gliding under the coils of the Craken. He
however rose up, when the apple-woman called him, and drank his tea,
and had some fairy bread with it, which refreshed him very much.
After tea he measured Mopsa again, and found that she had grown up to
a higher button. She looked much wiser too, and when he said she must
be taught to read she made no objection, so he arranged daisies and
buttercups into the forms of the letters, and she learnt nearly all of
them that one evening, while crowds of the one-foot-one fairies looked
on, hanging from the boughs and sitting in the grass, and shouting out
the names of the letters as Mopsa said them. They were very polite to
Jack, for they gathered all these flowers for him, and emptied them
from their little caps at his feet as fast as he wanted them.
[Illustration: “While crowds of the one-foot-one fairies looked on,
hanging from the boughs.”]