was silent for a moment, then answered,
“We fear they may be beginning to grow giants.”
“Why should you fear that?”
“Because it is so terrible.—I don’t want to talk about it!”
She pressed the baby to her bosom with such an anxious look that I dared not further question her.
Before long I began to perceive in two or three of the smaller children some traces of greed and selfishness, and noted that the bigger girls cast on these a not infrequent glance of anxiety.
None of them put a hand to my work: they would do nothing for the giants! But they never relaxed their loving ministrations to me. They would sing to me, one after another, for hours; climb the tree to reach my mouth and pop fruit into it with their dainty little fingers; and they kept constant watch against the approach of a giant.
Sometimes they would sit and tell me stories—mostly very childish, and often seeming to mean hardly anything. Now and then they would call a general assembly to amuse me. On one such occasion a moody little fellow sang me a strange crooning song, with a refrain so pathetic that, although unintelligible to me, it caused the tears to run down my face. This phenomenon made those who saw it regard me with much perplexity. Then first I bethought myself that I had not once, in that world, looked on water, falling or lying or running. Plenty there had been in some long vanished age—that was plain enough—but the Little Ones had never seen any before they saw my tears! They had, nevertheless, it seemed, some dim, instinctive perception of their origin; for a very small child went up to the singer, shook his clenched pud in his face, and said something like this: “‘Ou skeeze ze juice out of ze good giant’s seeberries! Bad giant!”
“How is it,” I said one day to Lona, as she sat with the baby in her arms at the foot of my tree, “that I never see any children among the giants?”
She stared a little, as if looking in vain for some sense in the question, then replied,
“They are giants; there are no little ones.”
“Have they never any children?” I asked.
“No; there are never any in the wood for them. They do not love them. If they saw ours, they would stamp them.”
“Is there always the same number of the giants then? I thought, before I had time to know better, that they were your fathers and mothers.”
She burst into the merriest laughter, and said,
“No, good giant; WE are THEIR firsters.”
But as she said it, the merriment died out of her, and she looked scared.
I stopped working, and gazed at her, bewildered.
“How CAN that be?” I exclaimed.
“I do not say; I do not understand,” she answered. “But we were here and they not. They go from us. I am sorry, but we cannot help it. THEY could have helped it.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, more and more puzzled—in the hope of some side-light on the matter.
“Always, I think,” she replied. “I think somebody made us always.”
I turned to my scraping.
She saw I did not understand.
“The giants were not made always,” she resumed. “If a Little One doesn’t care, he grows greedy, and then lazy, and then big, and then stupid, and then bad. The dull creatures don’t know that they come from us. Very few of them believe we are anywhere. They say NONSENSE!—Look at little Blunty: he is eating one of their apples! He will be the next! Oh! oh! he will soon be big and bad and ugly, and not know it!”
The child stood by himself a little way off, eating an apple nearly as big as his head. I had often thought he did not look so good as the rest; now he looked disgusting.
“I will take the horrid thing from him!” I cried.
“It is no use,” she answered sadly. “We have done all we can, and it is too late! We were afraid he was growing, for he would not believe anything told him; but when he refused to share his berries, and said he had gathered them for himself, then we knew it! He is a glutton, and there is no hope of him.—It makes me sick to see him eat!”
“Could not some of the boys watch him, and not let him touch the poisonous things?”
“He may have them if he will: it is all one—to eat the apples, and to be a boy that would eat them if he could. No; he must go to the giants! He belongs to them. You can see how much bigger he is than when first you came! He is bigger since yesterday.”
“He is as like that hideous green lump in his hand as boy could look!”
“It suits what he is making himself.”
“His head and it might change places!”
“Perhaps they do!”
“Does he want to be a giant?”
“He hates the giants, but he is making himself one all the same: he likes their apples! Oh baby, baby, he was just such a darling as you when we found him!”
“He will be very miserable when he finds himself a giant!”
“Oh, no; he will like it well enough! That is the worst of it.”
“Will he hate the Little Ones?”
“He will be like the rest; he will not remember us—most likely will not believe there are Little Ones. He will not care; he will eat his apples.”
“Do tell me how it will come about. I understand your world so little! I come from a world where everything is different.”
“I do not know about WORLD. What is it? What more but a word in your beautiful big mouth?—That makes it something!”
“Never mind about the word; tell me what next will happen to Blunty.”
“He will wake one morning and find himself a giant—not like you, good giant, but like any other bad giant. You will hardly know him, but I will tell you which. He will think he has been a giant always, and will not know you, or any of us. The giants have lost themselves, Peony says, and that is why they never smile. I wonder whether they are not glad because they are bad, or bad because they are not glad. But they can’t be glad when they have no babies! I wonder what BAD means, good giant!”
“I wish I knew no more about it than you!” I returned. “But I try to be good, and mean to keep on trying.”
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