A Wonder Book/The Golden Touch/After the Story
SHADOW BROOK
AFTER THE STORY
‘Well, children,’ inquired Eustace, who was very fond of eliciting a definite opinion from his auditors, ‘did you ever, in all your lives, listen to a better story than this of “The Golden Touch”?’
‘Why, as to the story of King Midas,’ said saucy Primrose, ‘it was a famous one thousands of years before Mr. Eustace Bright came into the world, and will continue to be so as long after he quits it. But some people have what we may call “The Leaden Touch,” and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon.’
‘You are a smart child, Primrose, to be not yet in your teens,’ said Eustace, taken rather aback by the piquancy of her criticism. ‘But you well know, in your naughty little heart, that I have burnished the old gold of Midas all over anew, and have made it shine as it never shone before. And then that figure of Marygold! Do you perceive no nice workmanship in that? And how finely I have brought out and deepened the moral! What say you, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Clover, Periwinkle? Would any of you, after hearing this story, be so foolish as to desire the faculty of changing things to gold?’
‘I should like,’ said Periwinkle, a girl of ten, ‘to have the power of turning everything to gold with my right forefinger; but, with my left forefinger, I should want the power of changing it back again, if the first change did not please me. And I know what I would do, this very afternoon!’
‘Pray tell me,’ said Eustace.
‘Why,’ answered Periwinkle, ‘I would touch every one of these golden leaves on the trees with my left forefinger, and make them all green again; so that we might have the summer back at once, with no ugly winter in the meantime.’
‘O Periwinkle!’ cried Eustace Bright, ‘there you are wrong, and would do a great deal of mischief. Were I Midas, I would make nothing else but just such golden days as these over and over again, all the year throughout. My best thoughts always come a little too late. Why did not I tell you how old King Midas came to America, and changed the dusky autumn, such as it is in other countries, into the burnished beauty which it here puts on? He gilded the leaves of the great volume of Nature.’
‘Cousin Eustace,’ said Sweet Fern, a good little boy, who was always making particular inquiries about the precise height of giants and the littleness of fairies, ‘how big was Marygold, and how much did she weigh after she was turned to gold?’
‘She was about as tall as you are,’ replied Eustace, ‘and, as gold is very heavy, she weighed at least two thousand pounds, and might have been coined into thirty or forty thousand gold dollars. I wish Primrose were worth half as much. Come, little people, let us clamber out of the dell, and look about us.’
They did so. The sun was now an hour or two beyond its noontide mark, and filled the great hollow of the valley with its western radiance, so that it seemed to be brimming with mellow light, and to spill it over the surrounding hill-sides, like golden wine out of a bowl. It was such a day that you could not help saying of it, ‘There never was such a day before!’ although yesterday was just such a day, and to-morrow will be just such another. Ah, but there are very few of them in a twelvemonth’s circle! It is a remarkable peculiarity of these October days, that each of them seems to occupy a great deal of space, although the sun rises rather tardily at that season of the year, and goes to bed, as little children ought, at sober six o’clock, or even earlier. We cannot, therefore, call the days long; but they appear, somehow or other, to make up for their shortness by their breadth; and when the cool night comes, we are conscious of having enjoyed a big armful of life, since morning.
‘Come, children, come!’ cried Eustace Bright. ‘More nuts, more nuts, more nuts! Fill all your baskets; and, at Christmas time, I will crack them for you, and tell you beautiful stories!’
So away they went; all of them in excellent spirits, except little Dandelion, who, I am sorry to tell you, had been sitting on a chestnut-bur, and was stuck as full as a pincushion of its prickles. Dear me, how uncomfortably he must have felt!