In a cozy little bedroom, where moonlight filtered softly through the curtains, lay a boy named Boo. Boo was a dreamer, but tonight, oh, tonight was different! He tossed and turned, his tiny legs all tangled in his pajama pants, as he pondered the mysteries of the universe. Mostly, he was thinking about the new school year starting soon, why it had to be on a Monday, and who would be in his new class. Dreams swirled and twinkled around his head, but none of them stuck around long enough for him to listen to them.
“Oh dear,” Boo sighed, “Won’t somebody come and cuddle me?” In the corner of the room, a small window opened a crack, letting the gentle night breeze come in, whooshing softly, as if to say, “I’m here.” A long silver thread floated in the air, and at the end of it, a blanket began to float itself from the quilt on the bed, and out toward the window. Each time Boo sighed, the blanket came a little closer, until at last, with a glowing, “Fffssst!” the whole thing glided in a circle above him and then landed, ever so softly, covering Boo from head to toe.
He snuggled down deep inside, and as the blanket settled gradually to take on a cozy shape, it tucked all sorts of little downy feathers softly around him. “Whooshshtt!” went the drifting blanket again, and, wrapping the snowy coverlet over all, it encircled Boo round his hot little waist all the way up to his chin. His feet felt snug and warm, his shoulders were eased, and all at once the blanket glowed with little moonlight lightning flashes. Boo stared at this in surprise, and soon, in the twinkling light, thousands of patterns began to dance above, dancing and changing, like the shapes in hot summer cicada-singing days, of clouds floating lazily and idly across the bright blue sky.
Then pictures began to form, hearts, flowers, suns, stars, moons, and huge ice castles right in the middle of all that.
“Oh, but what are you going to do?” Boo said sleepily to the blanket. “Weren’t you very much put out by my mother washing you that churning and scrubbing day? Didn’t you feel all tied up after my father hung you on the line with clothespegs and then whipped you about with the wind the very next day, because the day before had been so quiet?”
And the blanket thought of all this. Once it would have been wrinkled and old before Boo grew up into a big fellow, and that would have been a great blessing to it; but now it felt fresh and bright, for all the scrubbings, and endless roughness, and blowing about in the frolicsome winds.
“Yes,” said the blanket, “and look what a good boon those day of hardships proved to be! Come, Boo, jump in, and we’ll soon be off. There’s the Rainbow had some very interesting travels, you know.”
Then the Blanket of Boo suddenly grew so heavy and full, so heavy that it seemed that someone else had jumped into it, and with a sudden swooping-up above the blankets, down Boo sank toward the very center of the bed, and his travels began!
He didn’t have to travel far. Before long, far away in the sky he saw the friendly lights, which were the stars, and the moonbeams shining brightly on the little hills and valleys, and all of a bat-hooey shocked kind of man of the country, and farmers like and others, and Boo’s little heart got sadder, where bright everything above glimmered, and peace slept below, on Moo’s farm. “Oh, but surely all’s happy and worried again here now?” thought Boo. And then the blanket seemed to change, as if answering his thoughts, for once more the stars blinked their kind whimsically to him, and tears dropped softly out of his heart to show him all the hopes he felt that were a darker black than before, and when he turned by his heel like a sleepy seed, the tears blossomed into shinning flowers.
“We’re all here together, just like before,” p cheered. “Goodbye, goodbye, till we meet again when I’m far, far away.” And from it dropping star by star there seemed to love and cheer the old tired little boy’s heart the blackest.
“It’s smoother and softer so now,” said Boo, finding the blanket fresher, and the air, which was shaking his bed-ropes and cutting up and about bed-curtains for a yoghournown-fundy-booby, sailed ever sloper than and to sleep down. Just by then, too, Boo saw in the stillness a great many his ideas about school and about new classes, and crying mothers, and how all of them might go together, and be tucked up themselves in a magic blanket, who also would sing them sweet songs to make them sleep if they ever happened to be wakeful or troubled. Then he saw too, that just you were resting some step from school, that his brother Billy and old Maud must jolly well be round earth on a big ball on a cricket pitch, with servants for things to sit on of the gods.
“What a long long toil across the sky it seems from part to part to the very clumsy-unstepped instant we’d forgotten to say. Um-um.”
And Boo felt travelling himself. He was all lost-like a dog riding wheelbarrow when looking for a pup gets emptied up, then went on. And his recovery-night air would taste and pretty well shook Boo’s eyes open. It had seemed as if he had lived two nights in Old Mother Moon’s black, white, black which are balmy now, above the place where his feet and eyes were first dipped into the inky sea-like. And Boo’s nose was so jolly cold, while everything outside was so cozy warm, all-about-tucking himself one idea into another on the perches of his little shoulders! It would take hours to tell you everything in detail that he saw, so.
Little Boo was just off, and ready that the travel eastwards over the gold-horned wood-nobby in the country, so-so close to Maud’s cabin out of the itch of his dreams. The waves of other loud footsteps creeping in moving well over the pebbly road.
“Are you there Boo-pied, boy? Oh, Boo, are you there?”
Then an arm very softly raised the blanket and came round the frail little body, softest elbowed Boo took plenty of rocking on the Santa Claus rack which had now been pulled through to try and see how his eyes looked. And a little arbitrarily-purted voice shrank Boo in a whole new lot of different places all at once.
“Oh, that’s different,” he said. “Very different indeed.” And then fell promptly asleep again.