Chapter I

When Tom Cobble of Shortways was seven years old, he got stolen by the fairies. Perhaps it would be better to say that he got himself stolen, for he certainly did it on purpose.

At about that time of life he was feeling rather offended. He was then living with his Grandfather, who kept one of the Lodges of the Duke’s Park. The Park ran up hill and down dale, and the wall that went round it was twenty miles long, so that it had a great many Lodges, some of which were on highroads and bye-roads, and others in woods and meadows. Tom Cobble’s Grandfather’s Lodge was lucky enough to lie in a dale, with the river flowing just outside, where fishermen would come to sit in the reeds in the middle of the night, with lanterns and creels beside them. The lanterns had lights in them, but the creels had nothing at all, except a little green grass at the bottom. Sometimes Tom would get out of the window when his Grandfather was snoring, and go and talk to the fishermen, but they were all deaf and dumb. This was a pity, because Tom had a lot of interesting things to ask them, and even more to tell them.

“Why doos you fish in the dark?” said Tom Cobble. “There ain’t never no fish in the river at night; they all goos and swims in the sky. Why doos you bait with worms and gentles? I don’t like gentles I don’t. You’d ought to fish with parsley sauce you did. Why doos you sit with your feet in the reeds? There was a fishingman once and his feet took root and growed there, and he couldn’t goo away never no more, and so when my Grandad killed the pig I bringed him toasted chitterlings I did, but one time they mowed the reeds for thatching and so the fishingman ain’t there no more he ain’t, but they thatched him into Betsy Ware’s lean-to and that’s where he is now.”

The fishermen never answered his questions, or even said “Oh!” to his information, but some wind or other would always blow up, and the reeds would say “Shish! shish!” This offended Tom Cobble.

Just inside the Lodge gate was a knobbly grassy hollow, with fruit-trees and chickens and patches of flower-beds, and a sheet of vegetables, and a green bucket lying on its side half in and half out of a weedy pond. All this was Tom’s playground, but a bit further back the beeches and wild cherry-trees began, at the foot of a slope; the wild cherries got tired before they reached the top, but the beeches went all the way up. Tom Cobble was not supposed to go further than the first two cherry-trees, but he often tried to get as high as the top beech. This was difficult, because the ground was in ridges that were hard to climb and hollows that were easy to tumble in. They were covered and filled with beech-mast, as brown as a fishing-sail on top, and as black as pickled walnuts underneath. The mast lay so thick in the hollows that Tom Cobble sometimes tumbled into a drift of beech-leaf as deep as snow, and he came out with the old leaves in his hair and down his neck, and sticking to every part of his little person before and behind; and his palms and knees were as black as walnut-juice. Then his Grandfather knew where he had been. So he needn’t have asked,

“Where you been, Tom?”

But he did.

Tom said, “I seed a little rabbit with horns on its head I did, and I runned to catch it by its little tail, but the tail comed off in my hand, and the Duke comed by with gold boots on and said if I would plant the little tail in the beech-mast another little rabbit would grow on it come Michaelmas, and so I did, Grandad, you come and see.”

But his Grandad didn’t come and see; he went instead to the chimney-place where his carpet slippers were warming, and he laid his grandson across his knee, and the slipper said “Slap! slap!” This also offended Tom Cobble. For Tom Cobble saw the world in his own way, and if other people saw it different, he couldn’t help that.

It was these things which made him get himself stolen by the fairies.

He knew how, quite well. He went one evening to the mushroom field before the moon was up, and lay down in the middle of the biggest green ring there without saying his prayers. When the moon came up, the fairies came out and got him.

“It’s no manner of use, Tom Cobble,” they said, when he woke up under the Hill. “We’ve got you fast for seven years, and it’s no manner of use to cry.”

“I aren’t crying I aren’t,” said Tom. “Ol’ Betsy Ware she cried when the fox got her chickens, she cried so hard she did ‘at the Duke’s Steward comed in a pink satin coach and laid a gold gutter down her garden to catch her crying, with a little pool for goldfishes at the bottom. But her tears was that hot ’at the goldfishes frizzled, an’ she eat ’em for supper, an’ she gived me one and it tasted like treacle pudden.”

The fairies listened attentively, and then they looked worried and said, “What shall we do with him?”

“Let’s let him go,” said one.

“We can’t do that,” said a second, “we’ve bound him fast for seven years, and who knows what he’ll pick up in that time? Why, once he gets the hang of it, he’ll outdo Puck himself.”

_An old Enchanter limped forward._
]

“Hang o’ what?” asked Tom Cobble.

“Magic,” said a thoughtless elf—and clapped his hand over his mouth as he said it.

“We’s got the hang o’ magic at home we has,” said Tom Cobble. “We hanged its flitch in the chimbley-piece the day afore I comed away; an’ I left my Grandad a-plaiting of Puck’s chitterlings I did, and the rest of him’s in the pickle-tub.”

At this an old Enchanter limped forward and said, “Give the brat to me. I’ll keep him out of harm’s way. He shall serve his time as my kitchen-boy, and learn no more than I choose.”

So the fairies handed Tom Cobble over to the Enchanter and went back to their dancing.