The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon Page B

Westwoods.’
    â€˜Never!’ said Selina.
    â€˜I wish,’ said John, in a great state of exasperation, ‘you would understand that I mean what I say.’
    Selina began to dust the desk, and a flick of her duster sent the King’s writing on to the floor. The King picked it up angrily, hesitated, got rather pink, and at last said:
    â€˜So you read this, did you?’
    â€˜U’m-h’m!’ assented Selina.
    There was a rather long pause. ‘Well?’ said the king.
    â€˜It’s a bit of poetry, isn’t it?’ asked Selina.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I thought it was,’ said Selina. ‘Well, I think your room’s about done now.’ And she took herself out of it.
    The King felt so cross with her, that he crumpled his bit of poetry into a little ball, and threw it into the waste-paper basket, just to pay her out.
II
    The morrow came, and the Hunt set forth, for Westwoods.
    The eager young King rode first on his white horse, and his company of huntsmen and courtiers followed after. Presently the tall fence came in sight, but to the King it did not look so tall as it had done when he was a child. All along it children still crouched or stood in vain on tiptoe, trying to see through or over it.
    â€˜Stand aside, children!’ cried the King, and put his horse at the fence. Over it went like a big white bird, and behind him clattered his courtiers. But not one followed where he had led the way. Some of them were fathers, who had warned their little ones of such dangers that now they were afraid of them themselves; and some of them were sons who, men though they were, had been warned anew that morning by their parents, when the word went round that the King was hunting in Westwoods. So one and all, fathers and sons, turned back their horses at the wooden fence; and only the King, being an orphan and a bachelor, took the leap and rode into the woods alone.
    When he alighted on the other side, his first feeling was one of disappointment. His horse stood pastern-deep in withered leaves, and in front of him was a barrier of brushwood; dry twigs and branches, dead ferns and grass, all piled and mingled together, covered with white lichen and black rot. Caught in the barrier was a medley of all sorts of broken rubbish—torn pictures and broken dolls and tea-sets, rusty trumpets, old birds’-nests and faded wreaths of flowers, bits of ribbon in rags, glass marbles chipped and useless; books without covers, their pages scribbled over with pencil-marks; and battered paint-boxes, with few paints left in them, and those so cracked that they were past painting with. A thousand other things too, all as past use as one another. The King handled one or two—a humming-top with a broken winder, and the fragments of a kite without a tail. He tried to spin the top and fly the kite, but without success. Rather annoyed, and greatly puzzled, he rode through the barricade of rubbish to see what was on the other side.
    It was nothing but a waste of flat grey sand, as flat as a plate, and like a desert in size. Flat as it was, he could not see the end of it, and though he rode across it for an hour he came to nothing different, near or far. Suddenly he was seized with fear of riding on for ever in this nothing, and looking behind him found that he could only just discern the barrier he had left, as faint as a shadow in the distance. Suppose he lost sight of that too! He might never find his way out of the waste again. In a panic he turned his horse’s head, rode for the barrier as hard as he could, and in another hour had landed, with a sigh of relief, on the Workaday side of the fence.
    The children plastered against it saw him coming, and shouted with glee.
    â€˜What did you see? What did you see?’
    â€˜Nothing but an old rubbish heap,’ said John. The children looked at him doubtfully.
    â€˜But what’s in the woods, then?’ asked one.
    â€˜There