Well hello there! Let me introduce myself—my name’s Benny, that’s Benny the Bright to you. You see, I think of myself as the brightest chap in the village. Don’t you believe me? You will, when you hear my story.
It all began on a rainy afternoon. A man dressed in a dark cloak came to the door and asked for shelter. As I pored over my book, the rain pattering against the windowpane, I said, “By all means,” and gave him a warm seat and a pipe.
“I know a thing or two and more about mushrooms,” he began. Wasn’t that nice? And oh, the many stories of the old earth and its stones and plants he told me while the elements raged outside the window.
Suddenly the man outside turned and looked so long and earnestly in at the window, that I thought it was the gnome we often saw creeping in and out of the bushes. To think one should meet with gnomes in one’s own house!
And on opening the door, there he stood. The other man looked fixedly—it seemed to me reproachfully—at the gnome. Then the two, speaking quickly to one another, went away together into the wood like two cloud-borers, who on meeting quietly retire till they see a suitable spot to attack.
The next day all our quiet village was in confusion. The mushrooms had disappeared from the woods; not a single one was to be found. The dairy women, too, complained that all the cocks had greatest peculiarity when the farmer’s wife came into their hen-coops, and that nothing availed to treat their ailments. Then the church bells would not ring, for not a single gnome was to be found to help the harm done by his brethren. And there were worse evils than these. Who could have caused all the mischief? Of course it was those merry little fellows, gnomes and goblins!
In the first place, they got charmingly drunk on sauerkraut; the damp, raw green taste they stuff themselves with on account of the elements did not suit mine host, and so you can suppose how they treated it when they came to our village. It was wicked; for it put the farmers into such fidgets and disturbance about their land, that even the best fellow among them could not provide enough tobacco to quiet himself afterward.
Then afterwards, when they were drunk, they went into gardens and threw cabbage and gooseberry bushes about; and into the pens, turned my clever pig-rounds about. It was this that upset them, for I keep my hogs ruminating most particularly daintily over our tumblers of cleaning.
And, to crown all other evil, the farmer himself was turned into a goose by these busy pranksters, and quacked most lugubriously to anybody who charitably offered him anything to eat. That is why I must to-morrow set out with my shrill-piping sack, to see if I can’t scare those little troublesome fellows to their proper work again.
So that’s it. You ought to see me, then! Such a strange figure! blue trousers that were once white, a knapsack with a shrill pipe and green bag on my back, and wrapped round my body an old leathery coat.
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” said the boy to a laughing circle of faces, where he found himself suddenly, to his great surprise.
“You have been telling us quite a long story,” said one of the little girls, “and we have heard it all.”
“And we have learnt a great deal more too,” said another.
“And we have been glad to do so,” said the third.
“Oh, I am delighted!” said the boy. “And now will you all like to hear how I got rid of the mischievous fellows?”
And they shouted “Yes!” at the right minute.