Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
_THE MAGIC MAKERS AND_
THE BRAMBLE BUSH MAN
BY
MARGARET SUTTON
[Illustration]
_With Pictures by_
PELAGIE DOANE
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1936, BY
GROSSET & DUNLAP, INC.
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
[Illustration:
GILLY GILLY GALOO-OO
I WONDER WHO ARE YOU-OO!
]
_To Peggy-Muffins,
the little artist in
our family_
[Illustration: THE BRAMBLE BUSH MAN]
THE EXPEDITION BEGINS
Madeline Moffet stood on the corner beside the big sign that said USE
DRAGON MOTOR OIL. She liked to think of the sign as a warning, BEWARE
OF DRAGONS and the dragons as Mr. and Mrs. Lippett who lived in the
farm house beside the sign. Muffs boarded with them. She had been
told to go out and play but there was no one to play with except the
chickens. They made little friendly noises and tilted their heads.
“Talk! Talk!” they said and flocked after her.
Muffs wanted to talk with somebody. The dragons had an idea that
children should be seen and not heard and so she had kept everything
she wanted to say all bottled up inside herself. She thought the
chickens felt differently about it until she tried to catch one. Its
squawking frightened her and she dropped all of it but one long tail
feather which came out and was left waving in her hand.
“I’ll make b’lieve I’m an Indian,” she said to herself and stuck the
feather in her yellow hair.
Indians were supposed to follow trails. Muffs looked up the big road
with its little stores and shops and farm houses scattered in between
and decided at once that wouldn’t do for a trail. Then she looked down
the little road that went through the woods to the house where the
Tylers lived. Overhanging trees made it seem like a long tunnel. It
reminded her of the subway and shopping trips at home with her mother.
She walked slowly, thinking of her mother and their little apartment
in New York. They called it “the studio” and it was a tiny place with
paintings hanging all about and Muffs’ own little bed hidden behind
a green and gold screen. Last night her bed had been hidden behind a
curtain on the train. The curtain was green, like those overhanging
trees. Suddenly Muffs began to feel very sad and homesick. Then she
heard something. It was the strangest sort of thing she had ever heard:
Gilly gilly galoo-oo,
I wonder who are you-oo!
It sounded like a song and it came from a tree almost above her head.
She looked up. There, in the branches of the tree, was a little boy
about her own age. He was looking down at her with a friendly sort of
grin as he kept on chanting the song.
“I wonder who you are too-oo!” Muffs sang back to him.
“I’m a great discoverer,” he said, sliding out of the tree and leaning
against its trunk. “My name’s Tommy Tyler.”
“And I’m Miss Muffet. I’m staying with the dragons who live at the end
of this road. Didn’t you see the big sign, BEWARE OF DRAGONS? That
means Mr. and Mrs. Lippett.”
“I live at the other end,” said Tommy, “with Mom and Daddy and Great
Aunt Charlotte and Donald and Mary and the baby.”
“My! What a lot of people!” Muffs exclaimed. “In my family there’s only
Mother and me. Daddy went off and left us when I was just three years
old. I touched some of his things and he went to the ends of the earth
because there aren’t any children there.”
“Did he _say_ that?” questioned Tommy, coming closer to Muffs. He liked
this strange little girl from somewhere else. She was so different from
his sister, Mary, and all the children he knew at school.
“I don’t exactly remember what he said,” Muffs admitted, “but I do know
he stomped out of the room and pushed the elevator button so hard he
caught his finger----”
“What’s an alligator button?”
“_Elevator_ button,” said Muffs. “It’s to call the elevators. In New
York you go up and down in elevators like little moving houses. The
stairs go up and down sometimes too and the subways go _right under the
river_.”
“Ooo! Don’t you get all wet?”
Muffs laughed. “’Course not. It’s a tunnel. It goes under where the
water is.”
“I’ve got a tunnel,” Tommy said importantly. “I discovered it. It goes
under the floor in the workshop.”
Now it was Muffs’ turn to question and Tommy’s to answer.
“Can you go in it?”
“Yes, but you have to crawl and you’re all dressed up. I made a house
in there for the Gilly Galoo Bird and Thomas Junior. _They_ like it but
you wouldn’t. The dust makes you sneeze.”
“Don’t the Gilly Galoo Bird and Thomas Junior sneeze?”
“Thomas Junior’s too busy catching rats and the Gilly Galoo Bird can’t
sneeze ’’cause he’s made of iron. He’s a magic bird and lives in
Daddy’s carpenter shop. Want to see him?”
Muffs did want to see him. The carpenter shop sounded as new and
strange to her as her elevators and subways did to Tommy. Each felt
that the other was a little unreal. Afraid to take each other’s hands,
they started up the road side by side. A big black cat darted out from
somewhere in the bushes and began following them.
“That’s Thomas Junior,” Tommy explained. “He likes to go places with me
’cause I’m his master. There’s the house,” he added, pointing to it as
they turned the bend in the road.
Muffs saw two houses, like twin shadows, against the white sky. A walk
connected them and at the far end of the walk on a little flight of
steps, sat a girl whom she knew must be Mary. She was rocking a baby
carriage gently back and forth and singing a lullaby that fitted the
tune of Rock-a-bye Baby, and went like this:
Go to sleep, baby. You are so dear.
Go to sleep, baby. Sister is near.
Go to sleep, baby. Mother will come.
Go to sleep, baby and sister will hum
Mmmmm, Mmmmm, Mmmmm, Mmmmm ...
But while she was humming, Tommy and Muffs came into the wood yard.
“It’s plain as plain,” Tommy announced. “We’re not real people at all.
Ellen is the baby in the tree-top, I’m Tommy Tucker and you’re the
contrary Mary who had the garden. And this,” he added, making a low bow
and waving one hand toward Muffs, “is little Miss Muffet who sat on a
tuffet only she’s frightened away by dragons instead of spiders.”
Mary stopped humming and looked up in surprise.
“Is your real name Little Miss Muffet?” she asked.
“It’s Madeline Moffet,” the little girl explained, “but Mother’s name
is Madeline too so people call me Miss Muffet or Muffins or just plain
Muffs.”
“She’s from New York,” said Tommy. “She rides in alligators under the
river. I wanted to show her Balo.”
“What’s Balo?” asked Muffs.
“It’s what I call the workshop when I’m playing,” Tommy explained. “All
of Daddy’s tools come to life and talk and walk an’ everything. The
hammer is a snake, the monkey wrench a gilly galoo bird and Daddy’s old
broom is a tailor with a funny face.”
“Are they alive now?” asked Muffs as she stood on tiptoe and peered
into the shop window.
“No, because we’re not playing Balo. We’re being make-believe people
out of books.”
“I’m being myself,” said Mary, “and I don’t want to play.”
“You are playing! You are playing!” Muffs and Tommy both shouted.
“You’re being contrary and that makes you Contrary Mary.”
“I am not contrary and you don’t sing for your supper either, Tommy
Tyler, because you can’t carry a tune.”
“I can sing-song,” said Tommy, “and it sounds magic. Muffs can
sing-song too because she sing-songed back at me when I was calling
gilly-galoo out of the tree. That makes us not real and everything we
do all day MAGIC.”
“What’s that feather in your hair?” asked Mary eyeing the new girl
doubtfully.
[Illustration]
“I was playing Indian,” Muffs explained. “I was following a trail.”
“It was just our road,” Tommy put in. “That’s too wide for a trail. But
I know where there’s a real trail we could follow. It’s somewhere over
in those woods.” He pointed to the hillside beyond the apple orchard.
“Remember, Mary, we started to follow it once----”
“Oh, yes!” Mary exclaimed. “I remember. But it’s a long trail. It would
take all day.”
“We could pack some lunch,” Tommy suggested.
“I’ll go in and pack some now!”
So Mary, as eager for a picnic as the two younger children, wheeled the
baby around to the front porch and left Great Aunt Charlotte minding
her. Then she ran into the kitchen and asked Mrs. Tyler if she might
have a basket. Together they filled it with bread and cookies as well
as a big jar of strawberry jam.
“Here we are,” said Mary, opening the kitchen door and running along
the narrow walk that the children had named the Way of Peril. She
jumped over the One Way Steps and almost spilled the basket. “Here we
are! All ready to start on the expedition.”
Tommy had whittled out a whistle from an elderberry branch while she
was packing the lunch.
“I’ll be the leader!” he cried, blowing the whistle.
“No, I will,” cried contrary Mary.
“But I thought of it,” Tommy insisted. “I should be the leader.”
“No, I should!”
It began to sound like a quarrel and, as the day was much too fine for
quarreling, Muffs sat down on the One Way Steps to think of a way out.
It had been a quarrel that had sent her father to the ends of the earth
and she didn’t want anything to spoil this expedition.
“I’ll tell you what,” she exclaimed. “We’re supposed to be story book
people so let’s all say Mother Goose rhymes and the one who thinks of
the most can take the lead.”
Mary and Tommy looked at each other doubtfully, but both of them loved
a game and so it was agreed that they should begin by saying the rhymes
that fitted their own names. More and more followed until Mary could
not think of another one and had to drop out. Tommy thought of three
rhymes after that but Muffs knew at least a dozen more.
“I’ll say a beautiful one this time,” she said with a toss of her
yellow curls.
“No, an ugly one,” said contrary Mary.
“I like the funny ones best,” declared Tommy. “Then we could start off
laughing.”
Miss Muffet scratched her curly head a minute and then her eyes began
to dance as they always did whenever she thought of something clever.
“I’ll tell you what,” she cried. “I’ll say a rhyme that’s the prettiest
and the ugliest and the funniest all together!”
“You couldn’t!”
“Oh, yes, I could,” and to prove it she began reciting:
There was a man in our town and he was wondrous wise.
He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.
Then when he saw his eyes were out, with all his might and main
He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again.
“What’s beautiful about that?” asked Mary when she had finished.
“The two words ‘wondrous wise’,” she replied. “And the ugly part
is where he scratched his eyes out and the funny part is where he
scratched them in again.”
“Yes,” said Tommy thoughtfully. “There can be a real Miss Muffet and a
real Tommy Tucker and a real Contrary Mary, _but there couldn’t be a
really-and-truly Bramble Bush Man_.”
“I think there could,” said contrary Mary. “Let’s play he lives at the
end of the trail.”
“Oh, let’s!” cried Muffs, clapping her hands. “Won’t it be the most
fun? Only I can’t be the leader,” she added a minute afterwards,
“’cause I don’t know the way.”
“We’ll get you a Guide then. Here’s a hat for him,” said Tommy handing
her his own tall straw hat. Muffs stuck her feather in to make the
Guide look more like an Indian.
“But where is the Guide?” she asked presently.
Mary pointed to a clump of bushes where Tommy was busily whittling away
at something.
“I think he’s making him,” she whispered.
And, sure enough, when Tommy returned he had the Guide by the hand.
He was very thin and very tall and his hands had leafy fingers. His
twig nose pointed straight ahead of him and his eyes were very sharp.
Tommy’s sharp jack-knife had cut them deep into his head and the gash
that served as a mouth was wide and smiling. Muffs slipped the hat over
his head and it fitted exactly. Holding the Guide ahead of them, the
children started off.
[Illustration]