Once upon a time, in a magical forest bursting with colors of autumn, there lived a little bear named Betty. Now, Betty was smaller than all the other bears in her family. While her siblings climbed trees and chased butterflies, Betty would sit and watch, wondering if she could ever be as brave as them. Each day, she felt her heart flutter as she saw the other bears exploring farther into the woods. “Oh, it must be wonderful out there,” she thought. But each night, when they returned, she’d feel an ache in her chest. You see, Betty wanted to explore too, but she feared she was simply too little.
One crisp morning, Betty’s mother said to her, “Tomorrow, dear, I want you to follow the blue brook all the way to the falls. I’ll have your sister escort you as far as the big oaks, and then you’ll be quite alone. But you can do it! I know you will!” Betty felt a tiny tremor of fear. What if she met a ferocious tiger or a huge dinosaur? But then she thought, “Shall I always be afraid? Am I a bear, or am I a mouse?” That thought cheered her, and she resolved to set out bravely in the morning.
The very next day, her sister Gem came to keep her company till she came to the big oaks over which a little mountain brook bubbled and dashed. The woods were lovely, and Betty chatted about many things, pointing out the squirrel who sat on the fence-like stone watching them, and about the bees who were filling themselves with rich pollen for the honey-store. But soon they approached the big oaks. Betty kissed Gem good-bye and said, “And now I’ll march straight ahead and not turn once. When I reach the end of my journey, I’ll sit down on the bank of the big river till you come.” Betty stepped bravely to the very edge of the path, where the water rippled over stones as large as herself. She turned, and with a last smile at her sister, started on her journey.
She was feeling rather lonely when she saw a little creature getting along as best it could. It was not as large as a kitten, and its long ears flopped dismally as it hopped. “I declare!” said Betty. “You are even smaller than I am. What’s the matter with your ears?”
“Oh, good morning, Miss,” replied the little creature politely. “I was so embarrassed because I put them in the oatmeal bread last night. When I wake in the morning, I expect ever so many companies to call.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Betty gently. “I hope they will even yet soon come.”
“I’m sure they will,” said the creature excitedly and jumped in the air. Then turning a little red, he added, “But, Miss, when my company is very, very grand, they hop in the air quickly several times.” While he was saying this, the tiny yellow flower he was biting was coming between his whiskers, and it tickled his little nose so. He couldn’t help but say, “Mumblety bee.” Then his voice rose tierce, “Mumblety bee, mumblety bee.”
“I think you are a very polite little rabbit,” said Betty. “But I have to go on, for my mother wants me to go all the way to the waterfall by the big river.”
“Oh, yes! Yes’m!” said the rabbit, hopping rapidly on.
Betty was getting on very well during that first day of by no means being moved by either a deer or a wild pig scrambling down a steep bank. But when the night came it appeared altogether a different story. In the distance, she saw “house-lights” twinkling and chirping, but not household sounds which seemed to say, “Where for goodness’ sake is the honey? Sure it’s time for me to scold somebody!” and “Why don’t you cook shorter measures!” But Betty suddenly smelt and heard an awful croaking behind the shrubbery, which made even the frog stop, and Betty turned to run in another direction.
Betty felt very lonesome indeed while doing this, and could not restrain a tear which trickled down till she was quite wet on both sides of her tiny wolf-brown face. “I am just too, too little,” she began, and would have sobbed outright. But then she thought of the big bears in nursery-tale books, and stopped. “And it’s no use crying,” she concluded after a little while. “I must simply bear things.” So she dried her eyes as best she could, and set her teeth firmly together with a “Now, for the next thing.”
Bright and early on the following day, she set out again to follow the brook. But—nesses were on every side of Betty, and she would stand still for, I should think, four or even five minutes till she could make up her mind to pass through them. Even when a wild pig trotted along, she couldn’t help whimpering, for they were great dangerous monsters. But at last she confoundered herself with such thoughts as these: “Yes, yes! I know I am very little, and, yes! Yes! Guidance I’m not going to cry over it. These fears are sometimes necessary!”
She met no one more unlike the little rabbit than two strange squirrels who hopped from bough to bough with a peculiar voice in this very way. Betty, as she came near to them:
“What would you do, two men, under highs so tawdry? “Both would meditate it.”
“Quite the strangest creatures, I’m sure,” sighed Betty to herself. “I really did wish to ask if I was far, far from home.”
She should feel much more alone in all this if it had not been a creature of bright color, bound along the path in the merry, merry way which rats have in old uncle-tales.
“What is your name, honorable sis?” asked she, as she touched Betty on its cheek.
Mumblety bee, mumblety bee,” croaked the Deathwatch dowdily.
Then Betty mustered up all her force of indignation. “I am not a mushroom! I’m a Bear, and a highly respectably one!”
But the Sunflower by his chitter-chatting overcame all Betty’s tears, for she was vastly delighted at the polite interest to which, kindly inquire after the health of the Flower once more. Finally answering that the best of neighbours was “else none than as free to serve the best place with thy leaf,” she took the young bees home with her.
“Oh, Betty, how happy I am to see you!” squealed Gem, nearly smothering her in her joy. “Did I not feel sure you would come all right, although you might feel a little frightened here and there? Besides, you now know this long walk is really easy for you!”
“Yes! Yes! I do feel glad to be home again, but oh, it was such a lovey day in the woods I cannot say how blank it seems to be all one shade in an attic!” and Betty did not care if it really was a wonderfully nice attic, for of all things she is most forgot the colours and birds and flowers she had seen.
This story would be interminable if we were to dwell on all the subsequent days on which her mushrooms were placed by this foreign flower and shaken very kindly, or how Betty and her sisters exchanged visits with a Hole-knit goat.
By degrees, every visit was very beneficial to her; for each flower, as she came to it, and each animal, bird, or bee recited the name of a nut-tree for the next place on her journey, or told her how the plants required either sun or shade she could afterwards understand.
Betty was of some trouble with a hedgehog or two whom this cheating story might seem to have seen before, and also with a butterfly in toe-taps. At last, however, she came to know her woods quite well, and she considered herself coming to the various species of torta-peas with their stony beetles like dwarfs and a Taranti-Behaviour with the ends cut off.
“After all,” thought she sometimes, “it was even pretty presumption in me to think I could know them all after one day’s travel, or again even knowing them all would never, I believe, have left me; I’m sure they were all glad to see me and me, glad to see them again.”
She considered it her greatest advantage to have learnt, when trembling in the stranger’s woodland, you have only to sit down into a hem-lock tree-director, even on the Bronx side, right up to the Horse Elm and come everywhere else with the east side straight up; but she was all of a long-drawn sigh at finding he did not remember to have seen her, your bear at the Little Road overhead, because he never bothered his brains; otherwise she could easily have spoken to him in French, if nothing more; and our wild animal-conductor there she left.
Betty was younger for her bears’ brown when she came home from her woodland dining than when she went. She felt much more grateful to all her acquaintances than Betty had done for all their hospitality: “How would it have been, had I have missed it all?” was her constant soliloquy.
But before I dismiss this story too, I should like to explain, although I would it all to be a better one, it is no translatition of the same none. It is a pure, a pure inanity of allai. And being so, I should wish the two last chapters should not necessarily be cut off at the bottom, but which you have seen yourself in the lower ages amongst pink blooms that have stretched out white-sedgy in on flowers that had been honeyed out.