I’m Timmy the Turtle, and I want to tell you about one of my most wonderful days ever! It was summer, and I just hatched out of an egg and was crawling toward the woods when I noticed all those spiky, prickly things. I didn’t want to run over any thorns or sharp stones. So I turned to the right and bumped my head against a little girl’s foot. I looked up and saw a smiling face peering down at me. She wore a large sunbonnet and had a little pink parasol hanging from her arm.
“Well, you dear little creature! What are you doing so far from home?” she cooed, and then added with a laugh, “I suppose I am your home now, and that I shall have to start a floating garden. It’s wrong to cut up the ice in our pond in summer, but I do hate to think of leaving you behind,” and she gently lifted me, turned back the cover of her baby carriage, and popped me in with her doll.
Soon I found myself in a delightful place full of trees, flowers, and grassy lawns. There were rows of benches under the shade of the trees, and tables where children’s work was laid out. At the grassy end of a long table sat a little girl picking daisies, and beside her was a boy playing with a tiny white rat. Near the entrance were big children reading and others drawing with colored chalks, while the band played merry tunes from a balcony up above. What a nice time I was having! But I was feeling very hungry.
The little girl who had carried me from the city soon took me out of the carriage and up to a lady behind the long table. “I’ve brought you a turtle,” said the little girl; “but I forgot to put in any food. Do you think you could give me some cabbage?”
“Just what I was going to offer him. How lucky!” replied the lady, putting some in the palm of her hand.
So I ate it. Then the lady said, “Would you like me to cut off the pointed ends of his claws? Or shall I file them down smooth?”
“Oh, no,” said the child, putting me lovingly back in the carriage. “Turtles never complain when they walk over each other.”
“Good morning, children!” sang out the lady who had first brought me, coming up with a class of youngsters to hear stories under the trees. “Don’t you see we have brought you a new scholar?”
“Is it a turtle?” asked the tiny girl with the daisies, as she uprooted some clovers and held them over my head.
“Of course it is,” laughed the lady, glancing over her hand to see if it knew any tricks. But I knew none except to say “Thank you,” which I said solemnly in all languages and told her how much I liked being at the Reading soirees.
There was soon a screen put up from the sight of people passing, and half a dozen big children blinked at me from the other side of the table, and then all crawled away. Two small boys stood over me, and the top one held a small ragged book in his hand.
“Who’ll read to me?” I said.
“I will first,” replied one, and began. “There was a a steam shovel—a steam shovel, you know, was dug—was dug, notched, and made a machine.”
“That’s Tiddledywinks-a-dicky,” I began.
“Not translated,” remarked the boy gravely, and went on reading, “It was a steam shovel that it had eyes—and it had—had—a—”
“Oh! Please finish, will you!” I cried. I couldn’t wait any longer to know how the steam shovel dug the house out for the master; but I had to beg the little reader to rumple my head again and again till I felt all right. Finally he came to the end. “Then the master in the house who threw the sesame seed went off to sleep,” he read.
“There’s another,” said the boy sitting over the other half of the table, who had finished digging deep holes and smoothing things down.
“I’m an awful stupid one,” grinned the other. “I could read the beginning over and over, and once I read a whole row of leaves—just by itself. They were so interesting; they said there were so many days to let the bran swim and to roast it; and then calculated how many boxes. I used to think how pleased Father Goose would be,” and the reader turned his puzzled face toward me. “Do you think he ever heard of the same box and time that it would take to eat clean his Travel Diary before his book came out?”
“No,” I replied; “but he wasn’t grown-up like us.” I was quite an old person for a turtle with a shell nearly an inch over.
“Then you mean old,” continued the boy with the shelves, who returned from a little jaunt to the Reading-room beside the station-house, holding a big brown book all crushed like a sausage which said, “Don’t eat it. Look at my mother and father on my rear.” “Was that your mother in the park with the baby carriage?”
“No. I was popped into it, and taken back to the park,” I replied, “and she everywhere she went. Please take me under that umbrella. Oh! its open.”
The boy calmly held me over the shining black beetle under the pushing spokes, and when I had crawled on to the floor, I said, “Better out than in,” which turned the laugh-good equally with all those who had such wonderful adventures to relate.
I hardly know whether my boyish heart went the farthest when I said all about how cold countries are picked out of the map and fur coats stuck down—the little white spots of snow all looking frozen and stiff; or how a young lady was learned by heart till she went into a scrape and was drunk. But there was a merry lady who threw the sesame seeds who seemed to enjoy sharing my anxiety more, even, than tiddledywinks-a-dicky.
Then my boy and I listened while the other charmed us with the adventures of an ill-tempered girl whose tongue was poisonous to all people and things. “She is put into a world where none can speak,” I began again.
“Save the Worms,” finished the boy from the station-house, who came back from the Reading-room.
“Save the Worms,” confided his friend.
“Say something that isn’t a book-title first, and then you can publish Save the Worms afterward,” was Christy’s retort.
But his friend was still unconvinced that the lady traveling with ceased to annoy when bidden was any use to his narration. “You see,” he said slowly, “first she came across a monkey looking so cross-legged and as if stuffing needles and pumpkins was going all sweet and well, stuffed the same all over with a silly song-a-stave.
I turned to the boy by the shelves and asked, “Didn’t you sing such songs when a little fellow?”
“Never knew the name of one-all I knew was ‘sort’a’—no singing and horrible no-humps.”
“But who—who is that over there,” I thought, “quietly asleep?” So I lost that completely about the jolliest of readers lunching with us three.
And dinner got handy, too! A tall, red-faced, jolly brother of the lady who doesn’t mind growing old quickly came from our Division and stared in wonder right and left; and the better portion always seemed to come last. And, my, what wheaten and corn gluten and bran cakes piled in before his inquiring siblings and the key-bearer of our department!
After dinner the reader of our little party held me up in front of every person, even the aunt of the little boy who sings, and said solemnly all about what a jolly time I should have. His eyes began to twinkle when he spoke about “the unwilling lady readers shouting to the nearer each other to let down his eye-glass.”
But when he came to the man in the white hat and the face who felt of people, and of the man with gray hair to over-take and lock up his eyebrows promptly at the end of, “Please, sir, I want some more,” boomed my new friend’s deep voice loudly through the merged talk. I stared around me and wondered.
Then I went for a little while into the box at the end of our Division, and losing was losing myself in delightful realms. I felt hands stroking my head, and both boys close over, listening.
“The first step saves the shoe. The last mercy oil and flex,” shouted my friend beyond and I knew they were changing their minds.
I’m home again, and I have settled down happily among my brothers and sisters in the turtle-house in our garden. But so delightful as my little expedition into the great wide world, where the minute Geelong visits my dear Reading-room, and helps me always to become wiser. Is my journey to be celebrated by a large map entirely to yourself?
I don’t think so, but when I was going for the accident in the park, I saw pictured maps of good calamities such as Mount Cotopaxi and the people living close-by who perish day by day in numbers far exceeding the intolerable big bugs, absolutely.
Who have no one to feel and carry off but their own, now?
I laughed when I read this, and altogether my story-book was one of the most amusing I’ve ever come across. But is there no “Book of reading” where the young folk in the other parts fit the reader in the next half for our opening at once read their part right opposite? I could answer “dear children,” but I shall not tell you what. If I had learned their language while they were meting it out, they would have said something even as near as possible to “Once there was and there was not.”