Читать книгу The Adventures of Peterkin - Gilbert W. Gabriel - Страница 10

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PETERKIN was hungrier than ever. He had lost his faithful pumpkin, too! Oh, what could he do? He pondered a long while. He could try to cook some more flowers and vines on his stove. But, no ... he remembered what had happened the last time he tried. And, it seemed, there wasn’t anything else to eat on all the shore.

He must escape, then. He must flee this lonely beach. He must wander away to somewhere ... he didn’t know where—just somewhere else.

But how? For he had no Pumperkin now. His yellow house of a boat had been swept off on the waves, out beyond the horizon. At last, as he stood in deep thought, a merry idea came popping into his head. Indeed, it was an idea so full of mad adventure that, when it came to him, he had to burst out laughing and clapped his hands in glee. For he remembered what a comical thing had happened at the stove an hour before.

So he hastened to kindle a roaring fire in the black iron throat of its oven. Then he ran this way and that on the beach until, half sunk in the sands, he found a huge, pearly sea-shell. He tore it out and carried it back and set it on the stove. To make sure, he added a sprinkling of vines and flowers and silver sea froth. Then he climbed up on the top of his stove and sat himself down in the cup of the shell. Ouch! it was hot!

Just as before, there was a little curl of lavender smoke, a little shivering and rocking—then POUF! Up went shell and Peterkin and all!

Up, up, sailing up! Peterkin, clutching madly at the sharp sides of the shell, could feel the rush of wind against his face. He dared not look down, but he knew that the shore and all the wide-spread trees upon it were growing smaller and more distant. Something gray and filmy spun over his eyes, like a silken veil. He was in the clouds. Up, up, into the sunny blue again, where he could see the clouds below him now in great lazy billows. Up, up, always up!

Once the fragile shell groaned, as if it would give way into shatters and send its rider hurtling toward the hidden earth. Once it bumped against the great black, cindery side of a dead star and nearly turned topsy-turvy. Once its pearly lining cracked dangerously under the heated blaze of the nearby sun.

Now the flying shell and its rider were floating forward. And down, too. Down in a slow, curving line of grace—slowly, slowly down and forward, through the clouds and below them. Peterkin could see the high hills of a strange country now—a country where all the fields were yellow with grain, set in quaint squares like a checker board, and all the hills were soft with the green of pines. A silver thread of a river ran through the middle of the valley, and Peterkin could make out now the twinkling red roofs of cottages. It was the most peaceful scene he had ever come upon.

“Oh, how I wish I were there!” he sighed.

Which no sooner uttered than down dived his sea-shell straight upon the soft breast of a yellow haystack. Deep into the hay it landed, with never a bump or a scrape. Peterkin was safe in the valley.