Once upon a time in the joyful season of Spring, Ricky the Rabbit and Penny the Penguin chattered together on Racing Hill. Black clouds could be seen in the distance and little rain drops now and then slowly fell upon them.
“What causes that rain, Ricky?” asked Penny.
“It shows like a mist, but really it is just pure water, and it comes from a certain kind of tree,” Ricky replied.
“Are there trees to be found under water too?” Penny asked again.
“Of course,” said Ricky, wiggling his nose in a quite proud manner. “There is the largest tree known to folk under the water, where nobody can see it. It is capable of holding black clouds, and when it becomes too heavy, it presses them in the shape of drops, then out falls the rain that we see.”
Penny shook her head. “I don’t quite understand.”
“I can show you that it is as I say,” said Ricky, “this instant, if you please. Stand a little back, and you’ll see how quickly I will do it.”
So Penny waddled some little distance, wondering what Ricky was at with himself. His smart giddy-pup-eyed friend turned his back towards her and wriggled up a little mound which nature had made. He was there half a minute, then turned round to Sandy and cried:
“Come on now, come on, and you will see that I have kept my word and shown you what you wanted to see.”
So Sandy came on, but one step in the water made it his death, for down he went, and was drowned in a moment.
A poor little fish panted its last on the bank.
“Well, and now, Sandy, where is the tree, if you please? The one under the water, I mean, and that bears black clouds?”
“On the bank there,” said Ricky, “surely without asking for it, you’ll refrain from coming into the world again.”
But’s what coming into the world means, and what following the black clouds means too, ask no one knows, not even the black clouds themselves. If you do wish to find out, ask Mickey the Duck.
Ricky took the corpse up in his two hind-feet and placed it on the most prominent point of the landing-place.
“I’ll wager a flat penny,” said he, “to a smoking gun, that I am before you at five o’clock this evening, and all on account of the tree you saw, Sandy.”
And at five o’clock that evening Ricky was there, quite out of breath, and instead of a fish, he bore hard on his shoulders a hunch back.
“Now, don’t be afraid,” said he to Sandy; “that which I bring you now is a thing that may be depended on, and that I have long known of too, one that always knows how to speak: In a word, a phone. And that hunch is an album to write in.”
Ricky put down the hunch, but where he got it from himself, that ought to be written in the album.
Ricky now thought that Penny the Penguin ought to know what he had brought with him.
But coolly that species of Byrd offered to Sandy’s hunch a white pigeon-cote for his home, rich in vines and with cats sufficient to devour the hunch a thousand times.
Now, dearest children, that is indeed coming into the world again, is it not? And once too, and for others, you too will never have leave to forget it, unless you ask a sea-lion to be confined for three weeks in a female prison for the purpose of being born again.
But with these three weeks of mad-cap fun, of course Sandy was made up again and then rubbed for one or two days with his hunch.
The hunch will not last long, a fortnight at most. The fish only remained a moment. That, then, is the difference.