Читать книгу Daisy: or, The Fairy Spectacles - Guild Caroline Snowden - Страница 8

No sooner had Daisy stepped inside of her mother's door, than there came such a crash of thunder as she had never heard; and the little house shook as if it must surely fall.

The old trees ground their boughs together, and, blown by the wind, the night birds dashed with their wet wings against the door; the screech owl hooted, for the young were washed out of her nest; and the rain leaked under Susan's door sill, ran across the floor, and put out the little fire of brushwood which was burning on the hearth.

And Daisy thought of her father, out alone in this fearful night, and how the cold rain must be dripping into his grave.

She peeped through the window. The sharp, jagged lightning made the sky look as if it were shattering like a dome of glass. She wondered if that lightning might not be the light of heaven she had heard about, and whether, if the sky should really fall, heaven and earth would be one place, and by taking a long, long journey, she could find her father, and live with him. And she thought that, for the sake of having him to take her by the hand again, she would walk to the end of a hundred worlds.

Then the sky seemed to Daisy like a great black bell; and the thunder was the tongue of it that tolled so dismally over her father's grave.

She was startled by a bony hand laid upon her shoulder, and looking up, heard the old woman say in her sharp, shrill voice, "Come, little girl! don't you know I am hungry after all this work? Fly round, and get me something to eat."

And when Daisy noticed her poor, starved face, she wondered that she had not thought to offer her some food.

So she went to the closet, – the same one which poor Peter had shown to his wife with so much pride, – and pointed to bread and a dish of milk, – for the shelves were so high that Daisy could not reach them, – and drew her mother's easy chair into the dryest place she could find, and begged the dame to seat herself.

She did not wait to be asked twice, but hobbled into the chair, and, to Daisy's wonder, ate all the bread at a mouthful, and drank the milk at a swallow, and then, looking as hungry as ever, asked for more.

So the little girl brought meat, and then some meal, and some dried fruit, and even cracked nuts; but the more she brought, the more the fairy wanted.

If Daisy had feared any thing, she would have trembled when, at last, the old dame fixed her glittering eyes upon her, and began to talk.