Отрывок из книги
May Lillian Paten
Published by Good Press, 2021
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By this time it was nearly noon, and as Chit, Chat and Chut had forgotten to bring any lunch with them, they were very hungry. When they had scooped a hole through the white flesh, which they knew they must not eat, and had come to the pink they ate, and ate, and ate, getting deeper and deeper into the melon until, when at last they felt they could not eat another bite, they were very near the centre. It was deliciously cool and soft in there, and they were now feeling drowsy, so they decided to have a nap before they left it.
By and bye a man came into the field with a dray, and began to collect ripe melons to take to market. It was almost dusk when he came to the melon which contained the sleeping elves. Without noticing the small hole in it he picked up the big melon and threw it on top of the loaded dray. This rather rough treatment woke the sleepers, and for a while they could not make out where they were. When they remembered, they were very frightened indeed, especially as the dray was now moving, and the melons were jostling one another uncomfortably as it bumped over rough ground. It seemed a very long time to them before the horrible rocking motion stopped, and there was a rattling of harness and stamping of hooves, which meant that the horse was being taken out of the dray, which had been backed into a big shed. The brothers were now very wide awake, and very miserable. This made them quarrelsome.
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