The Wishing-Stone StoriesBurgess, Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo)
Science
The Wishing-Stone Stories
Burgess, Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo)
Animals -- Juvenile fiction; Fantasy fiction; Wishes -- Juvenile fiction
The truth was, Tommy was deep, very deep, in the sulks. He was so deep
in them that he couldn’t see jolly round Mr. Sun smiling down on him.
He couldn’t see anything lovely in the beautiful, broad, Green Meadows
with the shadows of the clouds chasing one another across them. He
couldn’t hear the music of the birds and the bees. He couldn’t even
hear the Merry Little Breezes whispering secrets as they danced around
him. He couldn’t see and hear because--well, because he _wouldn’t_ see
and hear. That is always the way with people who go way down deep in
the sulks.
Presently he came to a great big stone. Tommy stopped and scowled at it
just as he had been scowling at everybody and everything. He scowled at
it as if he thought it had no business to be there. Yet all the time he
was glad that it was there. It was just the right size to sit on and
try to make himself happy by being perfectly miserable. You know, some
people actually find pleasure in thinking how miserable they are. The
more miserable they can make themselves feel, the sooner they begin to
pity themselves, and when they begin to pity themselves they seem to
find what Uncle Jason calls a “melancholy pleasure.”
It was that way with Tommy. Because no one else seemed to pity him, he
wanted to pity himself, and to do that right he must first make himself
feel the most miserable he possibly could. So he sat down on the big
stone, waved his stick for a few moments and then threw it away, put
his chin in his two hands and his two elbows on his two knees, and
began by scowling down at his bare, brown toes.
“There’s never anything to do around here, and when there is, a fellow
can’t do it,” he grumbled. “Other fellows don’t have to weed the
garden, and bring in wood, and drive the cows, and when they do it, it
isn’t just when they want to have some fun. What’s vacation for, if it
isn’t to have a good time in? And how’s a fellow going to do it when
he has to work all the time--anyway when he has to work just when he
doesn’t want to?” He was trying to be truthful.
“Fellows who live in town have something going on all the time, while
out here there’s nothing but fields, and woods, and sky, and--and cows
that haven’t sense enough to come home themselves when it’s time.
There’s never anything exciting or int’resting ’round here. I wish----”
He suddenly became aware of two very small bright eyes watching him
from a little opening in the grass. He scowled at them harder than
ever, and moved ever so little. The eyes disappeared, but a minute
later they were back again, full of curiosity, a little doubtful, a
little fearful, but tremendously interested. They were the eyes of
Danny Meadow Mouse. Tommy knew them right away. Of course he did.
Hadn’t he chased Danny with sticks and stones time and again? But
he didn’t think of this now. He was too full of his own troubles to
remember that others had troubles too.
Somehow Danny’s twinkling little eyes seemed to mock him. How unjust
things were!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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