One hot summer’s day Tommy Brown went out into the woods to gather wild strawberries.
He had a funny little basket with him, made of green and blue paper. All the green and blue pieces had been cut into an equal number of little strips and then woven criss-cross in the form of a vase. All the morning he wandered on, picking strawberries and listening to the birds chirping and feeling very happy.
When he had wandered very far, he looked at his watch and found it was almost four o’clock.
“Oh dear,” thought he, “I must go home directly.” So he turned and retraced his steps. But to his dismay, instead of finding the way that he had come he saw a heavy tangle of trees and bushes that he had never seen before.
“I think I am lost,” he exclaimed.
He listened, hoping to hear church bells, so that he might guide himself by their sound, but he could hear nothing except a low whispering noise. The birds were no longer singing, and he sat down on a large stone to listen more carefully.
The whispering sound seemed to come from a great distance, but by patiently listening and often holding his breath Tommy at last began to make out the words that the sound was muttering–in fact, it was a plain sentence repeated over and over again.
“Hitchy, hitchy, under the apple tree.”
At first Tommy thought it was a few children speaking to one another, and asking each other if they could “hitch” as they did at home.
“Hitchy, hitchy, under the apple tree,” was all that Tommy could catch at first. He listened hard, and at last he heard more than the words–he understood something about the meaning too. Whenever one voice said the words “hitchy, hitchy,” each of the others seemed to repeat “pouchy,” so that to this sentence about “hitching,” there appeared to be a reply from other voices about “pouching.” And so the whole sentence went like this:
“Hitchy, hitchy, under the apple tree. Pouchy, pouchy, under the apple tree.”
Tommy ran into the thicket, and as he got nearer and nearer to the sound it became stronger and stronger, till at last, when he pushed the undergrowth aside, he stopped and looked round him in wonder, for he was standing in a large open space of meadowland all covered with thick grass and daisies, just like a child who had dropped asleep on a lawn and awoke suddenly in Fairyland.
A little way off was a large apple tree, and all round it sat tiny little green grasshoppers, and green beetles, and black ants–oh, lots of them! They were all dancing in pretty little clothes of various colours–red and blue, yellow and brown, and they looked so happy, running about with their long legs and wings. They were so happy themselves that they made Tommy happy too, and delighted to be there. He began to dance and sing, and clap his hands, but the moment he did so every insect turned tail and flew away, or ran away, or hopped away, or rolled away, in no little hurry, while the apple tree, which happened to be old and wise, murmured:
“Hitchy, hitchy, under the apple tree.”
“What’s that you say?” asked a hoarse voice above his head, and looking up Tommy’s surprise was doubled, for he saw that it was the trunk of the apple tree itself that was speaking.
“Please, Mr. Apple Tree, can you tell me the way to London?” asked Tommy Brown, very politely.
“Oh, that is so far away. You must hitchy, hitchy and pouchy, pouchy to get there,” grumbled the tree.
“But I must know the way directly, for I want to go home at once,” said Tommy.
“You should have thought of that earlier,” grunted the tree. “However, perhaps I may help you. When you have made up your mind which you will do, come back and let me know. I can secrete food for you either way.”
“I don’t want to eat,” said Tommy; “I only want to go home.”
“I know that,” replied the tree, impatiently, “but you must eat something on the way.”
Tommy did not understand this, but he thought to himself that no doubt the tree knew what was good for him, so he said no more.
“I must get to London,” went on the tree. “Now you can go either through the realm of the ants or through the realm of the gipsies. Which shall it be?”
“What’s the difference?” inquired Tommy.
“The ants are industrious, regular, sober little people, always working,” answered the tree. “Now the gipsies are, to say the least of it, very careless.”
“I should like to see the gipsies,” Tommy replied.
“Go on, then Master Tommy Brown,” said the old tree, “and give my best respects to the Cherry Sisters, dear little girls, but they live a long distance from here, I must tell you, and it will be very dark before you reach their tents. Do you hear?”
“Yes,” said Tommy; and forgetting the way he had come he bade the tree goodbye and went off into the realm of the gipsies.
Down, down, down he went, tumbling and rolling, and at some risk to himself, but at last he found the place where the gipsies lived.
The little tents were all scattered about over the green grass, and there were fires burning here and there. The smoke rose up in the soft summer air, and somehow it seemed to harden and keep itself close to the ground, while away beyond the gipsies’ tents and the spreading trees the stars were already twinkling in the blue evening sky.
The Cherry Sisters were sitting before the door of their tent, with their three baskets of cherries piled beside them. Occasionally they peeled half a dozen for the Celtic maidens, who sat near with anguished hearts at the fate of the hopes for the rainbow-coloured lilybuds she had in her memory.
When Tommy got his breath he asked them the way to London.
“What an odd boy you are!” said one of the gipsy girls, when he showed his red and blue basket of strawberries.
“My name is Tommy Brown,” said the little fellow.
“We don’t mean that, bluey,” she answered. “We meant your manner. You’re such a little oddity. You come all the way to us from the other world, we here in Fairyland, and yet you don’t know what to do.”
“Oh!” cried Tommy, “you don’t mean to say that I’m in Fairyland and it is dark and growing darker as fast as it can?”
“Quite so,” replied the Cherry Sisters.
“Well, what shall I do?” asked Tommy.
“Do?” said they. “The bright thing for you to do is to run home by the same way you came. The old Tree there will give you good advice, and show you the way. Then, when you are properly washed, combed, and dressed, go to bed, and talk to yourself of all the amusements and stories in the world that men and women enter a Capital City to enjoy.”
“Very well,” replied Tommy, and with a polite bow to the good little girls he turned about and went back to the Talking Tree.
“Well, did you think about what I said before?” asked the old over-hanging trunk.
“Yes,” said Tommy, warmly. “I will go back through the indentured ant-chanting because they are industrious, and will show me the way home out of this darkness.”
“Then you are a good boy,” said the Tree, “and I trust you will come to no harm.”
Tommy began to retrace his steps, for he was now ashamed to acknowledge that he had lost himself, and was so, in fact, only too glad to hide the confession of his stumble behind a little early twilight haze.
But when he came to the spot where the ants were holding their midnight concert, it was as light as a month-to-month holiday, with little twinkling radials round each ant holding the antlective beams of the [transfiguring nanopoke?] in its shell.
Tommy Brown was letting fly hot foot into their colony when the stranger in his tauntingly-cut costume, symbolic of nationality and place of birth, decided to hold a moment’s chime for observation upon.
“Please let me pass as quickly as you can,” he said to the busy workers. “I am so tired and I want to get home at once. I don’t want to do anything but go straight back to London.”
“Can you not at least throw dutifulness over the tiredness of your body?” said the Anthers; “and can you not appear in your usual smart undress?”
“How am I to do that?” exclaimed Tommy.
“Say whether you will ‘Hitchy hitchy, under the apple tree ‘Pouchy pouchy, under the apple tree,’” they said.
“But I don’t know what you mean by it,” Tommy was foolish enough to say.
“Then at our command mind your rhetoric!” said the Mother Ant.
“Hitchy, hitchy, under the apple tree, pouchy, pouchy, under the apple tree,” murmured Tommy Brown; and thereby did “Hitch” that evening at the lovely Cherry Sisters with their deep summer skirts.
In the very hottest part of that May morning he awoke from a soft sleep to the full pregnant splendour of rosy uncooled sunshine in the boreal morn as Tommy Brown, and all that had carved itself beautifully on board the ‘Pouchy animal-linx’ outlines he saw became just as he used to look at their mesmerically reverse reflections over the water on thasement of the richly-hurdklary sailor steamer in the dolls’ toilet washold in favour of sailors.