Once upon a time (which is how all good stories start, isn’t it?), there lived a boy named Henry. Every day he would come home from school, eat his supper, wash his hands and face, and then take his little dog out behind the barn, where he could be alone. He certainly did not want to be disturbed, for Henry had a great secret.
You see, this was not a barn at all. He had only to shut his eyes tight to find it changed into the loveliest castle ever seen. There it stood up high among the clouds, and was called the Cloud Castle, and Henry the Dreamer was the only boy who ever went to visit it. Many a little boy or girl has visited this castle, quite without knowing it, because all you have to do is to shut your eyes tight, like Henry, and believe with all your might, and in an instant you are there.
The castle, as I told you before, stood high above the clouds, bright and dazzling, and all covered with jewels, and through its wide-open doors poured a wondrous light. And on the highest tower hung the Prince’s great flag. The only way to get into this castle, I think, is by means of a green velvet shutte, which is hung out for people to come in and out by. Then up in the doorway stood a person in a very odd dress with a velvet suit and a silver crown. Of course, he was the Prince. He had invited Henry to visit him in the castle, and soon took him all through it, for it was very different from any other castle you ever heard of. It was furnished with all sorts of wonderful things, pictures, and statues, such as were never seen before. And the Prince took him about and showed him everything. First in one room there would be a boy strumming a harp, and then in another a girl playing on a violin; and then one child told stories while others listened, and another read stories out loud to everybody sitting about him. Once Henry came into a hall where young ladies were passing little slips of paper about. He asked what they were doing. “This is the room for sending congratulations. When anybody in the kingdom hears any good news, a card with it written on a slip of paper is sent to us, and we pass it about and congratulate each other on it.” In one room the children were having dances; in another they were looking at a beautiful picture, and doing everything to make it look nice, and then showing it to each other, and passing little notes about the points they most admired; and in another they were admiring the statues, and doing just as they had with the pictures, and when they found a point they particularly liked, copying it onto little slips of paper so as not to forget it.
Then the Prince told Henry that he himself had a great deal to do in the Kingdom. “As you see,” said Henry, “I have a large palace. I do not mean one of these rooms or paintings or dancings or treatings, but a large wooden house in which I live, and have so many good houses and fields that I get to work whenever I am in them. And people live in all sorts of places in my Kingdom, never dreaming they are not real and solid houses like mine; and yet they are not real houses at all, but dream houses.”
“But these people live in the Kingdom?”
“Well, yes; but you see the whole Kingdom is nothing but a dream itself, though every little boy or girl in the world thinks his house real enough.”
That night as soon as Henry had washed and had his supper and had taken his dearest little dog Dinah out behind the barn, where they could be by themselves, he went off to a corner of the garden and sat there till it was quite dark, and then came home and went straight off to bed; and it was no sooner there than he came into Prince’s palace. It was strange that nobody asked what he was doing or why he came into the palace all by himself after dark. But of course the truth is, it was not dark in the palace, and everybody saw he was there, and knew his business. The little fellow was not to be frightened by any darkness.
But the most curious thing was, Henry himself did not know the part that they had counted on his playing that night. There was going to be a festival in the Cloud Castle that night, and he was to be the one to bring down from the ceiling the splendid star which was going to be placed at the end of the dancing-hall to shine brightly down on the floor, and serve as a lamp. And the dancing-hall was as large as the whole of the square behind his house, where most of the boys and girls in the neighbourhood played.
So Henry went out to the staircase and up to the floor above, and out on to the roof, and in the middle was a huge star. All he had to do was to get a long ribbon, tie it tightly round the star, and let it hang down. He slipped one of his hands carefully up to the end of the star, and at that moment the ribbon went off, and the star was seen shining brightly in all its glory. He was just going to take hold of it with both hands, when he heard a voice crying out, “Do hold firm on the cloud, Henry,” it being Henry’s usual custom, before venturing anywhere, to take a good hold somewhere where there was a firm resting-place to hold by. And sure enough when Henry looked behind he saw Dinah’s head poked out from a whole lot of clouds. Then at one step Henry was off the roof and caught hold of Dinah by the collar, for he was afraid she would tumble off while he was not looking. Then in another moment he was in the palace again, but not quite safe, so they told him, “You will please stay out on the roof till everything is ready again.”
When Henry was sitting there, waiting for the dancing-hall to be ready for the star to be put up, all sorts of people, children and grown-ups, came up the staircase for many minutes; so many were there indeed, that it required a good little time to go over every head one by one. And then they all went into the dancing-hall.
The hall was as full of people as the square behind Henry’s house is of boys and girls at play. They soon separate into more companies than one, and a few couples dance. Then Henry, who was sitting there like a king in his state, playing hold-it-back, if you know the game, got up, and going to the centre of the hall began to make one of his most enchanting and gallant bows, the people separating to both sides, and leaving a space in the middle of the hall for him to pass down. He was in the middle of one of his finest debauches when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was his father, who had come to wake him. It is always a pity that grown-up people will come in and spoil pleasant dreams.
Henry woke up the next morning with the whole of the Cloud Kingdom in his own bedroom, Dinah and his little wooden house. The first thing he did, when the sun had quite risen, was to go to the large glass on the top of his piano, to see if that was not the magic door to the palace. But it was not; but the magic was inside Henry himself.