Ellen stood at the nursery window looking out at the gray sky and the wet, blowing branches of the trees. It had been raining and blowing all day. The roof pipes poured out steady waterfalls; the lilacs bent over, heavy with the rain. Up in the sky a bird was trying to beat its way home against the wind.
But Ellen was not thinking of any of these things. She was thinking of the story that her grandmother had forgotten again.
Ellen's grandmother was very old; so old that she often called Ellen by the names of her own little children; children who had grown up or died years and years ago. She was so old she could remember things that had happened seventy years before, but then she forgot a great many things, even things that had occurred only a few minutes before. Sometimes she forgot where her spectacles were when they were pushed back on her head. Most of all she forgot the stories she tried to tell Ellen. She would just get to a very interesting place, and then she would push her spectacles up on her forehead and look vaguely about her. "I forget what came next," she would say.
Very often Ellen could help her out. "Why, granny, don't you know the little bear's voice was so thin and shrill it woke little Silverhair right up? Then when she opened her eyes and saw the three bears--" or, "Why then when Jack saw the giant was fast asleep he caught up the golden hen--" and so the little girl would go on and finish the story for the old grandmother.
But there was one story that Ellen could not finish for her grandmother. It was a story that she had never heard; at least she had never heard the end of it. It was about a little princess named Goldenlocks who always had to wear a sooty hood over her beautiful shining hair, and who had a wicked stepmother.
Again and again the grandmother had begun the story, but she never got further in it than where Goldenlocks was combing her hair at night all alone in the kitchen. When she had reached that point she would stop and say, "Ah, what was it that came next? What was it, little Clara? Can't you remember? It's so long since I have told it." Clara was the name by which the grandmother oftenest called Ellen.
Sometimes the little girl tried to make up an ending to the story, but always the grandmother would shake her head. "No, no," she would cry, "that's not it. What was it? What was it? Ah, if I could but remember!"
She worried and fretted so over the story that Ellen was always sorry to have her begin it. Sometimes the old grandmother almost cried.
Now as the child stood looking through the window at the rainy world outside, her thoughts were upon the story, for the grandmother had been very unhappy over it all day; Ellen had not been able to get her to talk or think of anything else.
The house was very quiet, for it was afternoon. The mother was busy in the sewing-room, grandmother was taking a nap, and nurse was crooning softly to the baby in the room across the hall.
Ellen had come to the nursery to get a book of jingles; she was going to read aloud to her mother. Now as she turned from the window it occurred to her that she would put the bookcase in order before she went down to the sewing-room. That was just the thing to do on a rainy day.
She sat down before the shelves and began pulling the books out, now and then opening one to look at a picture or to straighten a bookmarker.
The nursery walls were covered with a flowered paper, and when Ellen had almost emptied the shelves she noticed that the paper back of them was of a different color from that on the rest of the room. It had not faded. The blue color between the vines looked soft and cloudlike, too, and almost as though it would melt away at a touch.
Ellen put her hand back to feel it.
Instead of touching a hard, cold wall as she had expected, her hand went right through between the vines as though there were nothing there.
Ellen rose to her knees and put both hands across the shelf. She found she could draw the vines aside just as though they were real. She even thought she caught a glimpse of skies and trees between them.
In haste she sprang to her feet and pushed the bookcase to one side so that she could squeeze in behind it.
She caught hold of the wall-paper vines and drew them aside, and then she stepped right through the wall and into the world beyond.
Beyond the Wall
It was not raining at all beyond the wall. Overhead was a soft, mild sky, neither sunny nor cloudy. Before her stretched a grassy green meadow, and far away in the distance was a dark line of forest.
Just at the foot of the meadow was a little house. It was such a curious little house that Ellen went nearer to look at it. It was not set solidly upon the ground, but stood upon four fowls' legs, so that you could look clear under it; and the roof was covered with shining feathers that overlapped like feathers upon the back of a duck. Beside the door, hitched to a post by a bridle just as a horse might be, was an enormous white gander.
While Ellen stood staring with all her eyes at the house and the gander, the door opened, and a little old woman, in buckled shoes, with a white apron over her frock and a pointed hat on her head, stepped out, as if to look about her and enjoy the pleasant air.
Presently she shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at the sky; then she looked at the meadows, and last her eyes fell upon the little girl who stood there staring at her. The old woman gazed and gazed.
"Well, I declare," she cried, "if it isn't a little girl! What are you doing here, child?"
"I'm just looking at your house."
"But how did you happen to come here?"
"I came through the nursery wall. I didn't know it was soft before."
A number of queer-looking little people had come out from the house while Ellen and the old woman were talking, and they gathered about in a crowd and stared so hard and were so odd-looking that Ellen began to feel somewhat shy. They kept coming out and coming out until she wondered how the house could have held them all.
There was a little boy with a pig in his arms, and now and then the pig squealed shrilly. There was a maid with a cap and apron, and her sleeves were so full of round, heavy things that the seams looked ready to burst. A pocket that hung at her side was full, too, and bumped against her as she walked. She came quite close to Ellen, and the child could tell by the smell that the things in her sleeves and pocket were oranges. There was one who Ellen knew must be a king by the crown on his head; he was a jolly-looking fellow, and had a pipe in one hand and a bowl in the other.
There were big people and little people, young people and old; and a dish and spoon came walking out with the rest. But what seemed almost the strangest of all to Ellen was to see an old lady come riding out through the door of the house on a white horse.
"I wonder where she keeps it," thought the little girl to herself. "I shouldn't think it would be very pleasant to have a horse in the house with you."
The old lady's hands were loaded with rings, and as the horse moved there was a jingling as of bells. The words of a nursery rhyme rang through Ellen's head in time to the jingling:--
"_Rings on her fingers And bells on her toes, She shall have music Wherever she goes._"
"Why," she cried, "it's the old lady of Banbury Cross. And"--she looked around at the crowd--"why, I do believe they're all out of Mother Goose rhymes."
"Of course they are," said the little old woman with the pointed hat. "What did you suppose would live in Mother Goose's house?"
"And are you Mother Goose?" asked Ellen.
"Yes, I am. Don't you think I look like the pictures?"
"But--but--I didn't know you were alive. I thought you were only a rhyme."
"Only a rhyme! Well, I should think not. How do you suppose there could be rhymes unless there was something to make them about?"
"And all the rest, too," said Ellen dreamily, looking about her. "'Tom, Tom, the piper's son,' and 'Dingty, Diddlety, my mammy's maid,' and 'Old King Cole'--why, they're all alive. How queer it seems! I wonder if the stories are alive, too."
"Yes, just as alive as we are."
![Cover of Peter Pan: [Peter and Wendy]](/covers/16.jpg)
