There were so many things to be discovered along the trail they were
following that the children thought they would be wondrous wise
themselves before they reached the end of it.
The greatest discoverer of all was the Guide. He wore the Bramble Bush
Man’s glasses on his twig nose and peered out of the thick lenses
for all the world like a college professor studying maps of strange,
undiscovered places. He pointed ahead with his leafy arms and Muffs
followed eagerly after him. Tommy still insisted that the Guide was the
Bramble Bush Man but Muffs and Mary had set their hearts on finding the
real owner of the glasses.
“You know yourself,” Mary said practically, “that the Guide didn’t lose
the glasses and so they couldn’t be his.”
“Maybe he did. Maybe he lost them when he was still a tree.”
“If he could talk,” Muffs said, “I might b’lieve he was wondrous wise
but he doesn’t say a word.”
“Wise people don’t talk,” declared Tommy, “unless they have something
to say. But look! He’s pointing. He’s pointing to that bird’s nest
right over our heads.”
Muffs had never seen a nest with eggs in it. The Guide hooked an arm
over the branch and bent it to show her the eggs but she saw baby birds
instead. Five of them! And all five had their bills open like cups. By
standing right back of the Guide she could see them through his glasses.
“It’s magic,” she cried. “The birds have turned into baby dragons.”
Tommy looked too and, sure enough, everything was twice as big through
the glasses. He caught a small worm and held it in his fingers.
“Here’s a snake for you, baby dragons,” he said.
Muffs and Mary fed them crumbs of bread and cookies. Soon all five of
the funny bills were closed and five pair of eyes were blinking off to
sleep. Shadows grew longer. The children hurried a little faster and
forgot to look through the glasses.
“My, it’s a long trail!” Muffs sighed after an hour or so of hurrying.
“Seems as if it must go to the ends of the earth.”
“The earth is round,” said Mary. “Round things haven’t any ends.”
“Then there isn’t any such place?” asked Muffs, dismayed. But Tommy
pointed through the trees to where the earth and sky seemed to meet
each other.
“That looks like the end of the earth,” he declared. “If we just keep
on following the trail we’ll get there by night.”
“It’s night now,” said Muffs with a shiver as she leaned heavily on the
Guide. “I can’t even see the trail through his glasses. You take the
lead, Tommy. Maybe he’ll show you the trail.”
She handed him the Guide and for some time they walked on without a
word. The noise of their feet in the brush sounded louder now as if
they were waking someone from sleep. Birds chirped at them from the
trees and twice a woodchuck crossed in front of them. He sat up like a
dog and seemed to listen.
“He thinks we ought not to be here,” Tommy said. “He wants us to go
home.”
“Well, aren’t we going home?” Mary asked.
But her little brother had stumbled over a log and was busy picking
himself up. Then he had to look for his whistle. A tiny black beetle
found it before he did and crawled inside. Through the glasses he
looked like some giant eclipsing the sun. Tommy puffed out his cheeks
and blew very hard, trying to get him out. Mary saw him doing it and
edged over to Muffs.
“I don’t believe he sees the trail at all,” she whispered. “Could we be
lost?”
“Then Tommy could blow the whistle.”
“He’s trying to, but it won’t work,” Mary returned. “Even if it did
blow, no one would hear it way off here in the woods.”
Muffs had not thought of that. In New York people heard whistles and
there were always kind policemen to take lost children home. Here they
had nothing except the wooden Guide and his head was too small to
hold many brains. No one believed in his wisdom now but Tommy. He was
holding him close to his face and peering anxiously through the glasses.
“Tommy!” Muffs called. “Can you really see the trail through those
glasses?”
“I can see it _through the glasses_,” he called back, “but when I look
again, it’s gone.”
“Then we are lost!” Mary cried. “I knew it! Tommy had no right to take
the lead.” And she began to cry.
Muffs felt like crying, too. Night made her think of her own little
bed back in the studio. Her mother was always there, just outside the
screen. Muffs had only to peep through a crack to see her working away
at her painting. Perhaps it would be a painted woods as green as the
one they had just passed through, or a sky as bright as their sky had
been before the sun sank in a pool of red clouds. She thought of all
this and then remembered that, for the first time in her life, she
would have to go to sleep without her mother’s kiss. There would be no
green and gold screen, no little bed, not even a blanket ...
“I s’pose we’ll have to cover up in leaves like the babes in the
woods,” she said, her lip trembling.
Mary did not answer. She stood watching the trees grow darker and
darker as the last red cloud was swallowed up by the hill. Tommy headed
for the valley.
“We’re bound to come out somewhere,” he said hopefully.
“We are not,” Mary sobbed. “Lost people just keep going ’round and
’round in circles.”
“Then we aren’t lost,” Tommy declared. “We haven’t passed the same
thing once and we’ve had a Guide to lead us all the way.”
Too tired to argue, Mary nodded and her hand tightened on Muffins’ arm.
The air felt chilly and a wind was whistling overhead in the branches.
Louder than Tommy’s whistle sounded its ooo-ooo! Louder than their
voices when they called! Did the wind always make such a noise, Muffs
wondered. Was that a light ahead of them or only a star showing through
the trees?
All at once Tommy gave a shout and pointed.
“A house!”
It was indeed! And the queerest little house that ever was. It had no
door and the roof sloped nearly to the ground. None of them had seen it
before although it must have been there. A house couldn’t move. And
yet this house seemed to have appeared by magic.
“Maybe it’s growing up out of the ground and isn’t all up yet,” Muffs
said in a whisper.
“It looks that way,” Tommy agreed, “’specially the window.”
“It’s the Bramble Bush Man’s house!” exclaimed Mary. “Didn’t I tell you
there could be a really-and-truly Bramble Bush Man?”
“You didn’t believe it yourself when you said it.”
“Well, now I do,” she answered and turned again to look at the house
that couldn’t be a house at all. It kept right on growing out of the
ground as they walked toward it. Now they could see all of the window.
A long, narrow walk went up to and right through it. Certainly nobody
on earth except the Bramble Bush Man would live in a house without a
door.
“He might be a burglar,” said Muffs in a whisper. “Then he’d be used to
going in windows.”
Mary thought he was either a giant or a college professor but Tommy
still insisted he was the Guide. Whatever he was, they were curious and
kept on. If they paused it was only to wonder something else and soon
all three of them were walking along the plank. It tilted this way and
that and felt something like standing up on a see-saw. They found the
window halfway open and it was easy to crawl through. Mary went first
and Muffs and Tommy followed her. They were dragging the poor Guide
after them. He made a scraping sound of protest as he slid over the
window sill. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” he kept repeating but he had
been silent all afternoon so now the children wouldn’t listen.
The first thing they saw was three other children scrambling into
another window on the opposite side of the room. They started walking.
So did the other children. They stopped and the other children stopped
too. The wooden Guide bowed to another wooden Guide and suddenly
everybody began to giggle.
“Why, it’s only us,” said Mary when she had stopped herself from
laughing.
“Then,” said Tommy, “it must be a giant’s looking-glass.”
“Oooo!” squealed Muffs. “The Bramble Bush Man must be a giant. He’ll
cook us and eat us if he finds us here!”
Mary looked hard at her. “Do you think,” she asked seriously, “that a
wondrous wise man would cook and eat little children?”
“He’d be very kind,” Tommy added, “almost as kind as Daddy. He’d let us
play with the things in this room just like Daddy lets us play with his
tools in the carpenter shop.”
“Would he really?” asked Muffs. And then, all at once, she knew
perfectly well that the Bramble Bush Man was kind. For there, on a long
table, was a delicate cage of gold wire and in it a little white rabbit
was hopping about and twitching his funny nose. He looked well cared
for and nobody but a very kind man would trouble himself to take good
care of a rabbit.
Other things were on the table too, things so strange that only a
wondrous wise man would know how to use them; rings and hoops and balls
and bottles and a deck of cards big enough for a giant to play with.
They were all reflected in the mirror so that, for every one, there
were really two, but Muffs could see only the rabbit. She had forgotten
the Guide who lay there beside the cage with his tall hat askew. Mary
and Tommy had forgotten him too. They poked their fingers through
the cage to feel the rabbit’s velvety nose and then Tommy found an
odd-looking stick and poked that in too.
What happened then was so surprising that none of the children ever,
ever forgot it. The Guide gave one leap, all by himself, and then
clattered to the floor, leaving his hat and glasses behind him. A
small, flat piece of metal clattered after him and knocked off one of
his arms. Then he lay still and turned quietly back into a stick.
The children were so busy watching him that, for a minute, they didn’t
look at the table but, when they did look, both the rabbit and the cage
were gone. They were gone! They weren’t anywhere on the table. They
weren’t on the floor. They weren’t reflected in the Bramble Bush Man’s
big mirror. They simply weren’t anywhere!
“Gee!” exclaimed Tommy, looking first at the stick in his hand and then
at the stick in the mirror. After a little while he said, “Gee!” again.
It was all he could say.
Mary couldn’t say anything but Muffs found herself talking all at once
as if she would never stop.
“It’s a magic wand!” she cried. “We’ve really turned into story book
people. We’re not real and the rabbit wasn’t real and I don’t b’lieve
even the house is real. But we can make things real again with the
wand. Touch something else, Tommy, and see what happens.”
“Aw, you touch something,” he said, handing her the stick as if he were
glad to get rid of it.
“What shall I touch?” she asked, circling around the room. Nothing in
it seemed very solid and she had never outgrown her fear of breaking
things.
“Try this,” suggested Mary, pointing to a large vase of flowers that
stood on an equally large stand. “Maybe you can change them into gold
the way King Midas did in the story.”
“I’d love golden roses,” Muffs said softly. She had a feeling that she
was acting on a stage and that those three reflections were really
watching her. Even the floor felt wabbly. It was more like a stage than
ever when she played fairy princess and reached out with her wand to
touch the roses.
Then she forgot to act! It wasn’t a bit like a play any more because
something perfectly dreadful had happened. Muffs had broken the vase!
She hadn’t meant to break it. She had only tapped it ever so gently but
the moment the wand touched it the whole bottom fell out. It left a
great hole that went right on through the stand and looked deep enough
to go through the floor too, through the floor and through the earth
until it came to China on the other side. Flowers, soil, everything was
swallowed up in this enormous hole. Muffs wanted to crawl into the hole
too and hide forever so that nobody would ever know the awful thing she
had done.
“You’ve broken it,” Mary was scolding her. Two Marys were scolding her,
the real Mary and the Mary in the looking-glass. Two Tommys stood there
big-eyed, staring at what was left of two Guides with leafy fingers.
“I guess he wasn’t the Bramble Bush Man,” Tommy’s voice said
sorrowfully. “Let’s beat it before the real Bramble Bush Man comes
home.”
“But that wouldn’t be fair,” Muffs said and took one of her curls to
wipe away the tears that just would come. “He’ll know anyway if he’s
wondrous wise. I’ve got to fix it.”
She bent over the vase, trying to find the piece that had fallen out.
Was it something like this, she wondered, that had sent her father to
the ends of the earth? Muffs felt sure that wise men could get very,
very angry.
Just then a door opened somewhere. The children didn’t stop to wonder
where. They only heard the creak of its hinges, the rattle of the knob
and somebody’s big footsteps coming.
“It’s the Bramble Bush Man!” cried Muffs in a panic.
Tommy stuffed the glasses in his pocket and Muffs grabbed the tall
straw hat while Mary grabbed both their hands and pulled them through
the window. They didn’t turn their heads to see the three frightened
children in the Bramble Bush Man’s big mirror. Sliding, falling,
picking themselves up as they ran, they never looked behind them until
they stumbled into a road.
[Illustration]