Kindergarten Read Free Page B

tired that he sat down, and wished to rest, but as soon as he did this, one of the sisters in the basket cried out, “I am looking through my little window, and I can see that you have stopped. You must go on again at once.”
    He thought it was his bride who was talking to him, got to his feet, and began to walk on.
    He had walked a little further, when he felt tired again, and sat down, but the other sister immediately cried out, “I am looking through my little window, and I can see that you have stopped. You must go on again at once.”
    Every time he paused, or tried to sit down, the sisters cried this out, and he was compelled to move onwards. Finally, groaning and breathless, he arrived at the parents’ house, with the gold, and the two sisters.
    In the house in the forest, the magician’s bride prepared the wedding-feast, and sent invitations to all the magician’s friends.
    Then she took a skull with its grinning teeth, put rich jewellery around it, flowers in its eye-sockets, and decked it with a garland, and carried it upstairs to her little window, so that it looked as if it were looking out. Then she cut open the feather-bed, covered herself in honey, and rolled herself in the feathers until she looked like a strange and wonderful bird, and could not be recognised.
    As she walked away from the house and through the forest, she met the magician’s friends on their way to the wedding-feast. They asked her:
    “Fitcher’s bird, how did you come to be here?”

“I have come from Fitcher’s house, quite near.”

“Where is the young bride, and what is she doing?”

“From cellar to attic all’s sparkling and new,

And from her little window she’s looking at you.”
    Further along in the forest she met the magician, who was coming slowly back from her parents’ house. He asked her the same questions as the others:
    “Fitcher’s bird, how did you come to be here?”
“I have come from Fitcher’s house, quite near.”
“Where is the young bride, and what is she doing?”
“From cellar to attic all’s sparkling and new,
And from her little window she’s looking at you.”
    The magician looked up, and saw the disguised skull in the window. He thought it was his bride, and called up to her. Then he and all his friends went into the house for the wedding-feast.
    At this moment, the brothers and all the relatives of the bride arrived, sent to save her by her sisters. They locked all the doors of the house, and closed all the shutters, so that no one could escape, and set fire to it.
    The magician, and all his friends, perished in the flames.

three
    L ILLI D ANIELSOHN’s illustration for “Fitcher’s Bird” was a water-colour, a double-page spread of a quiet interior flooded with warm light, a meticulous representation of a middle-class German bedroom in the late 1920s. On the extreme right of the picture, a beautiful dark-haired girl, the second sister, was beginning to open a door set into the bedroom wall. The curtains over the window were about to billow outwards into the room as the door opened. Plants on the window-ledge, a carved table, an oil-lamp, the individual threads in a woven bed-cover.
    Beyond the bedroom door, unseen and unrecorded, was the mutilated body of her murdered sister. No blood seeped beneath the door into the image of domestic peace. In her left hand the girl held the fragile egg, which, when stain with blood, would mean that her life was over. Her face, in intense close-up, the eyes very large, did not look towards the forbidden room, but gazed out of the picture, towards the onlooker. She was very young.
    A FTER C ORRIE had poured the boiling water into the teapot, he sat down to wait for a while before pouring out the tea.
    The Kate Greenaway playing-cards Mum had fixed on the fridge door were still there. The six of diamonds had a picture of three little boys at the entrance to a churchyard. We’re
all jolly boys, and we’re coming with a noise
. Mum.
    He stared at