NOW
WE ARE SIX
A. A. Milne
Books for Boys and Girls
by A. A. MILNE
with Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard
Winnie-the-Pooh
THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER
When We Were Very Young
Now We Are Six
THE WORLD OF POOH
THE WORLD OF CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
THE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN STORY BOOK
Song-Books from the Poems of A. A. MILNE
with Music by H. FRASER-SIMON
THE POOH SONG BOOK
FOURTEEN SONGS FROM WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG
A. A. Milne
Now We Are Six
with decorations by
Ernest H. Shepard
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
Publishers: New York
NOW WE ARE SIX
Copyright, 1927, by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc
Copyright Renewal, 1955, by A. A. Milne
All rights reserved.
Reprinted September 1961
in this completely new format
designed by Warren Chappell
Printed in the United States of America by the
American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York
Introduction
When you are reciting poetry, which is a thing we never do, you find sometimes, just as you are beginning, that Uncle John is still telling Aunt Rose that if he can't find his spectacles he won't be able to hear properly, and does she know where they are; and by the time everybody has stopped looking for them, you are at the last verse, and in another minute they will be saying, "Thank-you, thank-you," without really knowing what it was all about. So, next time, you are more careful; and, just before you begin you say, "Er-h'r'm!" very loudly, which means, "Now then, here we are'; and everybody stops talking and looks at you: which is what you want. So then you get in the way of saying it whenever you are asked to recite . . , and sometimes it is just as well, and sometimes it isn't. . . . And by and by you find yourself saying it without thinking. Well, this bit which I am writing now, called Introduction, is really the er-h'r'm of the book, and I have put it in, partly so as not to take you by surprise, and partly because I can't do without it now. There are some very clever writers who say that it is quite easy not to have an er-h'r'm, but I don't agree with them. I think it is much easier not to have all the rest of the book.
What I want to explain in the Introduction is this. We have been nearly three years writing this book. We began it when we were very young . . . and now we are six. So, of course, bits of it seem rather babyish to us, almost as if they had slipped out of some other book by mistake. On page whatever-it-is there is a thing which is simply three-ish, and when we read it to ourselves just now we said, "Well, well, well," and turned over rather quickly. So we want you to know that the name of the book doesn't mean that this is us being six all the time, but that it is about as far as we've got at present, and we half think of stopping there.
P.S.—Pooh wants us to say that he thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won't mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake.
Contents
page Solitude 3 King John’s Christmas 4 Busy 9 Sneezles 14 Binker 17 Cherry Stones 21 The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak 24 Buttercup Days 31 The Charcoal-Burner 32 Us Two 35 The Old Sailor 38 The Engineer 44 Journey’s End 46 Furry Bear 48 Forgiven 50 The Emperor’s Rhyme 53 Knight-in-Armour 57 Come Out with Me 59 Down by the Pond 60 The Little Black Hen 62
NOW WE ARE SIX
TO
ANNE DARLINGTON
NOW SHE IS SEVEN
AND
BECAUSE SHE IS
SO
SPESHAL
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1927, before the cutoff of January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1956, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 67 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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