Once upon a sunny summer in the land of Greenost, there lived an amiable little toad named Tilly. With her speckled green body and big bright eyes, she was the very picture of cheerfulness, and all who met her loved her. Every morning, after she had eaten her breakfast of young water lilies and other delicate breakfast foods, she hopped out to her favorite seat on the Great Yellow Lily Leaf and gazed across the green waters of the Enchanted Pond.
All that summer long, Tilly thought and thought, but she could not make up her mind about anything to do.
Whenever she sighed she thought of the lovely blue sky and the white gold cloud thousands of miles above her and everything that lived underneath it,
And you can imagine how lonely she would have been if the dragonflies and the water beetles and the skaters and the fish did not all pay her daily visits.
One beautiful morning as Tilly was seated on her favorite leaf, an old familiar voice cried out to her:—
“Penny, penny, I prithee give me a penny.”
It was the blind man’s penny.
“Dear, dear,” exclaimed Tilly, “that was something still to be desired! How often when I was young and I came across a penny have I whispered to myself, ‘Would only something still to be desired came my way!’”
“Something still to be desired is worth much more than much that is,” said Tilly the Toad.
So now when she meets the blind man’s penny scooting through the pond, Sister Loo never fails to cheerfully give it a salute, when the rarest of lucky tickets announces itself,
Then, Tilly, darling, went to sleep in her lily.
Her mind chased about for some time—as it had a fancy to do at its pleasure. Suddenly it thought, “If I could only find the hidden treasures of the pond, how valuable my ticket would be!”
So the first wish that ever came true from the bottom of Tilly’s little heart was to seek for the hidden treasures of the pond.
Thousands of years and thousands of fishes afterwards, the penny tells this story.
Here it is still, so till the end of time will you find the blind man’s penny wandering or waiting about the Enchanted Pond.