Fantasy literature; Hunting stories; Runaway children -- Juvenile fiction
"I'll live here, and eat candy all day long, with no tiresome school or
patchwork to spoil my fun," said Lily.
So she ran up the chocolate steps into the pretty rooms, where all the
chairs and tables were of different colored candies, and the beds of
spun sugar. A fountain of lemonade supplied drink; and floors of
ice-cream that never melted kept people and things from sticking
together, as they would have done had it been warm.
For a long while Lily was quite happy, going about tasting so many
different kinds of sweeties, talking to the little people, who were very
amiable, and finding out curious things about them and their country.
The babies were made of plain sugar, but the grown people had different
flavors. The young ladies were flavored with violet, rose, and orange;
the gentlemen were apt to have cordials of some sort inside of them, as
she found when she ate one now and then slyly, and got her tongue bitten
by the hot, strong taste as a punishment. The old people tasted of
peppermint, clove, and such comfortable things, good for pain; but the
old maids had lemon, hoar-hound, flag-root, and all sorts of sour,
bitter things in them, and did not get eaten much. Lily soon learned to
know the characters of her new friends by a single taste, and some she
never touched but once. The dear babies melted in her mouth, and the
delicately flavored young ladies she was very fond of. Dr. Ginger was
called to her more than once when so much candy made her teeth ache, and
she found him a very hot-tempered little man; but he stopped the pain,
so she was glad to see him.
A lime-drop boy and a little pink checkerberry girl were her favorite
playmates; and they had fine times making mud-pies by scraping the
chocolate rocks and mixing this dust with honey from the wells near by.
These they could eat; and Lily thought this much better than throwing
away the pies, as she had to do at home. They had candy-pulls very
often, and made swings of long loops of molasses candy, and bird's-nests
with almond eggs, out of which came birds who sang sweetly. They played
foot-ball with big bull's-eyes, sailed in sugar boats on lakes of syrup,
fished in rivers of molasses, and rode the barley horses all over the
country.
Lily discovered that it never rained, but snowed white sugar. There was
no sun, as it would have been too hot; but a large yellow lozenge made
a nice moon, and red and white comfits were the stars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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