Penny was a brave girl. She often thought about all the adventures she would have when she was older; sometimes she would lie awake at night planning what she would do first. But then she thought about the dark and strange things she would have to encounter, and made up her mind that when the time came she would never venture far away from home.
She was lying on her bed one evening, watching the stars come out. A quarter of an hour later it was too dark for her to see them. Dusk had come on while she was thinking.
Suddenly she was roused by a sound outside her window. She ran to the window and opened it. In the deepening twilight she could see the tops of the trees in the little forest; dark, mysterious things; so dark, that down in the valley where she lived she could scarcely see them at all. How queer it looked! No one could tell what strange animals might be hidden away there in the dark places.
“But I shall never find out,” said the child.
Then a strange thing happened. A little fairy person came and knocked at her window. A light shone around him, and the child gazed at him with wonder; she felt so glad and glad. The fairy shook his head, and said, “Come, come, Penny. I am from the Fairy Queen, and I am to take you right away into the dark forest, so that you may find out all the strange things that are going on there.”
“Oh! no, no,” murmured the child, trembling.
“We will keep you quite safe, and bring you back first thing in the morning,” said the little fairy.
In a low voice Penny said, “I’ll try.”
So she went to the window, which opened out into a little corridor. As soon as she stepped out a beautiful fairy person led her along, at the end of which was a flight of stairs covered with flowers. Penny thought she must be in a dream, for it was so beautiful she could hardly believe it. All sorts of sweets grew on the trees, all round clustered little fairy houses with shining lights, and the birds sang beautiful melodies. At the foot of the stairs sat a large white tiger, the mansion of the Fairy Queen. “Will you tell me, please, what animals these are jumping about so merrily all around,” asked the child.
“They are only poor little happy souls,” said the tiger. “When they die they do not go far off; they come back again and haunt the spot where they loved best to be while on earth, and therefore become happy souls, instead of happy spirits.”
Penny laughed and said, “Then it is really they who haunt the spot,” and the tiger looked at her with large, wise eyes.
“Now, if you like, I will take you to different parts of the forest,” said the fairy; “but remember it will be ask to you to see what you like best.”
“It has all been so pretty I do not know what I like best,” said Penny.
They went to the lion’s house. There the lion was holding a court.
Over against him was a ravenous beast roaring, “You give such feasts that I can scarcely walk from your door, and beside you always know how to feed your guests, while you expect me to come when I owe you two hundred pounds.”
“I cannot help it,” said the lion. “Really, Mr. Rook, it was a very unfortunate thing for us both that somebody had to pay for your dinners, but it was not I. Nevertheless, I expect you to come at once.”
Then came an unnaturally slender black cat, the Lord Mayor of Cairo, who told of the cats’ latest new education scheme for mice, and how bad their behaviour was, etc.
At homesick moments Penny wished to go back. But still she thought, “It really was very unkind of the animals to be so rude to each other, and then for the lion personally—I wonder whatever made him take them all under his protection if a few pounds mattered him so little?”
And then the king beast, either for pity or in order to give him the blues, told how all wrongdoers would be punished with the utmost severity when he was once dead.
Every one of the cats was introduced to Penny by some worse animal still, till she grew quite sick of them. There was no place free of them. One cat opened a drawer full of mice, and a raven sought or undertook to deliver herself some letters to those still more outlandish people who live in the furthest corner of the earth mentioned. Penny saw she could never get away from them, and therefore she did not like the animals.
Penny was tired, but all animals could not help being there. “Lady Paula knows nearly their whole generations,” said the lion, “writes long histories of them, but Lady Paula was also at the last dinner, and there it was that Prince Huntly, the main voice in anything clever that’s said here, introduced Penny to Sir Elphinstone M. A. C. Mr. Owad Wexpiece, and lots of others. And all of a sudden the conversation turned rather sharply round when the abovementioned Prince alluded to a big neighbouring country. What on earth driven it in your head to go there at all, when they, on their part, are told to keep themselves at home and mind their own business? I would rather table a corner to your map, or even write a drive-your-carriage-through-a-short-cut nodograph, just here, than the latest confounded state of affairs there. And Paul Illersbatanis inquired, “What’s your new-fangled way of naming the sheet from which one writes letters, as it did not seem giving it rather a finer name than it ought to have? That’s worth knowing.”
But things were far more social. The cats told each other of their letter-writers and their drawers-full, so that something was at once taken off each adventurously given dinner every Sunday.
At last the animals asked Lady Paula if she had herself seen Penny, and they seemed really so glad, and laughed so much when she answered that we did not choose the future here, that we should like her to come again sometime.
When the dawn and the grey streaks of light tinged the sky, a tiny fairy reminded Penny that she must not dally but return home.
In an instant they were there. All sorts of flowers showed in the first sunbeams, and around her happy soul appeared those that were sad. Little voices whispered softly to her that she should so conduct herself during this day as if she must tell all about it at night to the fairy.