Читать книгу Forty Good-Night Tales - Rose Amy Fyleman - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTHE SHUTTLECOCK
There was once a shuttlecock who thought a great deal of himself. He gave himself such airs, indeed, that all the other toys in the cupboard where he lived disliked him intensely. He even snubbed the battledore, which was absurd, for, after all, what is a shuttlecock without a battledore?
"I can fly," he said. "None of you can do that but me."
One day, Molly, the little girl to whom he belonged, was playing with him in the garden.
There was a high wind. "I really am just like a bird," he thought, as he rose into the air. But the wind caught him and carried him high up into the branches of a tree. He stuck in the fork of a branch, and there he stayed.
Even Molly's father couldn't get him down.
"Never mind," he said. "I saw a beauty in a shop to-day, much finer than that one. Red and green. I will bring it for you to-morrow."
The shuttlecock didn't very much enjoy hearing that, but he soon had much worse to put up with.
He wasn't at all comfortable in the tree. The birds pecked at him. The rain came and drenched him through. He lost all his colour and most of his feathers.
Winter came on and he was cold and wretched.
He would have given anything to see the battledore's friendly round face.
He had one comfort. He heard the stories that the trees and the wind and the stars tell one another at night, and that the birds tell one another in the evening and early morning, and these are the most beautiful stories in the world. When spring came there was a terrific gale, and he fell to the ground.
Molly found him there. "Throw him away," said her mother. "He's no use at all."
But Molly couldn't bear to do that.
She put him carefully away in the cupboard with the other toys.
"Be good to him," she said to them.
They were all wonderfully kind, and the shuttlecock's heart was touched.
In time he became a great favourite.
He was a shabby little bit of a thing, and he couldn't fly; but that didn't matter at all.
He could tell the most wonderful stories, and, of course, if you can tell stories it doesn't matter what you look like. Does it?
