Part 2

“Well, now I do,” she answered and turned again to look at the house that couldn’t be a house at all. It kept right on growing out of the ground as they walked toward it. Now they could see all of the window. A long, narrow walk went up to and right through it. Certainly nobody on earth except the Bramble Bush Man would live in a house without a door.

“He might be a burglar,” said Muffs in a whisper. “Then he’d be used to going in windows.”

Mary thought he was either a giant or a college professor but Tommy still insisted he was the Guide. Whatever he was, they were curious and kept on. If they paused it was only to wonder something else and soon all three of them were walking along the plank. It tilted this way and that and felt something like standing up on a see-saw. They found the window halfway open and it was easy to crawl through. Mary went first and Muffs and Tommy followed her. They were dragging the poor Guide after them. He made a scraping sound of protest as he slid over the window sill. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” he kept repeating but he had been silent all afternoon so now the children wouldn’t listen.

The first thing they saw was three other children scrambling into another window on the opposite side of the room. They started walking. So did the other children. They stopped and the other children stopped too. The wooden Guide bowed to another wooden Guide and suddenly everybody began to giggle.

“Why, it’s only us,” said Mary when she had stopped herself from laughing.

“Then,” said Tommy, “it must be a giant’s looking-glass.”

“Oooo!” squealed Muffs. “The Bramble Bush Man must be a giant. He’ll cook us and eat us if he finds us here!”

Mary looked hard at her. “Do you think,” she asked seriously, “that a wondrous wise man would cook and eat little children?”

“He’d be very kind,” Tommy added, “almost as kind as Daddy. He’d let us play with the things in this room just like Daddy lets us play with his tools in the carpenter shop.”

“Would he really?” asked Muffs. And then, all at once, she knew perfectly well that the Bramble Bush Man was kind. For there, on a long table, was a delicate cage of gold wire and in it a little white rabbit was hopping about and twitching his funny nose. He looked well cared for and nobody but a very kind man would trouble himself to take good care of a rabbit.

Other things were on the table too, things so strange that only a wondrous wise man would know how to use them; rings and hoops and balls and bottles and a deck of cards big enough for a giant to play with. They were all reflected in the mirror so that, for every one, there were really two, but Muffs could see only the rabbit. She had forgotten the Guide who lay there beside the cage with his tall hat askew. Mary and Tommy had forgotten him too. They poked their fingers through the cage to feel the rabbit’s velvety nose and then Tommy found an odd-looking stick and poked that in too.

What happened then was so surprising that none of the children ever, ever forgot it. The Guide gave one leap, all by himself, and then clattered to the floor, leaving his hat and glasses behind him. A small, flat piece of metal clattered after him and knocked off one of his arms. Then he lay still and turned quietly back into a stick.

The children were so busy watching him that, for a minute, they didn’t look at the table but, when they did look, both the rabbit and the cage were gone. They were gone! They weren’t anywhere on the table. They weren’t on the floor. They weren’t reflected in the Bramble Bush Man’s big mirror. They simply weren’t anywhere!

“Gee!” exclaimed Tommy, looking first at the stick in his hand and then at the stick in the mirror. After a little while he said, “Gee!” again. It was all he could say.

Mary couldn’t say anything but Muffs found herself talking all at once as if she would never stop.

“It’s a magic wand!” she cried. “We’ve really turned into story book people. We’re not real and the rabbit wasn’t real and I don’t b’lieve even the house is real. But we can make things real again with the wand. Touch something else, Tommy, and see what happens.”

“Aw, you touch something,” he said, handing her the stick as if he were glad to get rid of it.

“What shall I touch?” she asked, circling around the room. Nothing in it seemed very solid and she had never outgrown her fear of breaking things.

“Try this,” suggested Mary, pointing to a large vase of flowers that stood on an equally large stand. “Maybe you can change them into gold the way King Midas did in the story.”

“I’d love golden roses,” Muffs said softly. She had a feeling that she was acting on a stage and that those three reflections were really watching her. Even the floor felt wabbly. It was more like a stage than ever when she played fairy princess and reached out with her wand to touch the roses.

Then she forgot to act! It wasn’t a bit like a play any more because something perfectly dreadful had happened. Muffs had broken the vase! She hadn’t meant to break it. She had only tapped it ever so gently but the moment the wand touched it the whole bottom fell out. It left a great hole that went right on through the stand and looked deep enough to go through the floor too, through the floor and through the earth until it came to China on the other side. Flowers, soil, everything was swallowed up in this enormous hole. Muffs wanted to crawl into the hole too and hide forever so that nobody would ever know the awful thing she had done.

“You’ve broken it,” Mary was scolding her. Two Marys were scolding her, the real Mary and the Mary in the looking-glass. Two Tommys stood there big-eyed, staring at what was left of two Guides with leafy fingers.

“I guess he wasn’t the Bramble Bush Man,” Tommy’s voice said sorrowfully. “Let’s beat it before the real Bramble Bush Man comes home.”

“But that wouldn’t be fair,” Muffs said and took one of her curls to wipe away the tears that just would come. “He’ll know anyway if he’s wondrous wise. I’ve got to fix it.”

She bent over the vase, trying to find the piece that had fallen out. Was it something like this, she wondered, that had sent her father to the ends of the earth? Muffs felt sure that wise men could get very, very angry.

Just then a door opened somewhere. The children didn’t stop to wonder where. They only heard the creak of its hinges, the rattle of the knob and somebody’s big footsteps coming.

“It’s the Bramble Bush Man!” cried Muffs in a panic.

Tommy stuffed the glasses in his pocket and Muffs grabbed the tall straw hat while Mary grabbed both their hands and pulled them through the window. They didn’t turn their heads to see the three frightened children in the Bramble Bush Man’s big mirror. Sliding, falling, picking themselves up as they ran, they never looked behind them until they stumbled into a road.

THE PUBLIC NOTICE

“Whew!” exclaimed Tommy, taking a breath. “Jiminey! Where are we?”

They all looked about. There they were standing in the middle of the big, dusty road right where it branched and went on up Lookoff Mountain. At their left was the schoolhouse with its shutters closed for the summer. At their right was the grange hall where pie socials and spelling bees were sometimes held. Beyond, the church raised its lofty steeple and behind them was the Millionaire’s House, big and imposing as ever. Nothing was different. The Bramble Bush Man’s queer little house was nowhere to be seen.

“You were right, Muffs. It wasn’t real,” said Tommy in an awed whisper.

“No,” agreed Mary. “It wasn’t. A real house couldn’t disappear any more than a real rabbit could. But we’re real again and I think it’s time we went home. Let’s take the short cut.”

But, in the meantime, Muffs had looked inside the Guide’s tall hat. She looked to see what made it so heavy and two bright pink eyes looked back at her. Two long ears went back and a soft nose twitched as much as to say, “You didn’t know I was here, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” said little Miss Muffet, just as if the rabbit had really spoken.

“Didn’t what?” asked Tommy.

“Didn’t know there was a rabbit in the Indian Guide’s tall hat.”

Mary looked and her dark eyes grew round as saucers.

“Goodness Sakes Alive!” she exclaimed. “It’s the same rabbit that disappeared in the Bramble Bush Man’s house!”

Tommy gave a whistle of surprise. “So it is! Gee willikins, Muffs! How did it get there?”

“The same way we got here, I guess. Magic.”

“There isn’t any such thing,” said Mary trying to be practical but she might as well have said, “There isn’t any such thing as air,” for it was all around them. First the glasses, then the house and now the rabbit. Muffs stroked his silky ears and they flattened down on his round little body so that he looked like a soft white ball.

“I never had a pet,” she said. “You have your white cat, Mary. And Tommy has Thomas Junior and now I have Bunny Bright Eyes.”

“The name fits him,” said Tommy.

“Just the same you can’t keep him,” Mary declared. “The Bramble Bush Man will know.”

“Oh,” she cried. “I hope we never meet him. He’ll be madder than ever if he thinks I stole his rabbit and we can’t take it back when the house is gone.”

“I think we’re dreaming,” Tommy announced loud enough to wake himself up if he had been.

“Maybe it’s the glasses,” suggested Mary. “Feel in your pocket, Tommy, and see if you still have them.”

Yes, the glasses were there, their thick lenses looking more like eyes than ever. It wasn’t nice, having the eyes of a wondrous wise man watching everything the children did. They made things look bigger. Even the naughty things they had done that day looked much, much bigger through the glasses.

“I’d like to get rid of them,” Tommy confided.

“You should have left them in the Bramble Bush Man’s house.”

“But, Mary, we couldn’t leave anything in the ghost of a house,” said Tommy with a shiver. “I s’pose the Guide’s a ghost by now and we’d have been ghosts too if we hadn’t run away.” Then he turned to his new little playmate. “Muffs, you’re from the city and know a lot. Why don’t you think of something?”

So Muffs sat down on a curb stone, still holding the rabbit carefully in the Guide’s tall hat. But all she could think of was how angry the Bramble Bush Man would be when he found the broken vase and missed his rabbit. Then she thought of Mr. and Mrs. Lippett and how they would scold her and wished she were home in her own little bed instead of sitting on a cold stone trying to think. Her bed was so warm and cozy and safe behind the green and gold screen. Then the screen made her think of her mother’s paintings and the paintings, strangely enough, reminded her of signs. The rest was easy.

“We might put up a Public Notice,” she announced.

“But where?”

“I know where!” Tommy cried excitedly. “On the walls of the Post Office. Everybody comes in there after mail.”

Muffs thought she ought to hide the rabbit and stroked its ears so that they would lay flat and not show over the brim of the tall hat. People didn’t carry rabbits in hats when they went to the Post Office.

The big doors were hard to swing open and Tommy was just tall enough to reach the desk. He found a pen and first he tried to write the Public Notice on one side of a blotter. The ink all soaked in and it looked like shadow writing. Then he tried the other side and wrote this:

He stopped writing and held his pen in the air. Neither he nor Miss Muffet noticed that it spattered a round spot of ink on the back of her good dress.

When they reached the corner house, Tommy and Mary ran on home and left Muffs to face the dragons alone. She felt that Mr. and Mrs. Lippett had actually changed themselves into two huge dragons with fire in their eyes. Both of them were waiting on the porch. Both of them had deep scowl lines in the center of their foreheads. When they saw Muffs’ dirty face and torn dress with the big ink spot on the back the scowls grew bigger but they didn’t say a word until Bunny Bright Eyes poked his head out of the tall hat.

“Good land!” exclaimed Mrs. Lippett. “She’s got a rabbit.”

“Now where did that come from?” asked Mr. Lippett, looking like a thundercloud.

Muffs’ face was burning red but for a moment she couldn’t say a word. When she did speak it was only to stammer. “I--I met some children--the Tyler children--and we went on a--a _exposition_. They let me take their hat and this rabbit got into it. None of us know how.”

“Nonsense!” the thundercloud exploded. “A little girl doesn’t come home with a pet rabbit in her hat and not know where she got it.”

“I think it belongs to someone,” Mrs. Lippett declared. “You had better take it right back where you found it.”

“I found it in the hat,” Muffs insisted. “I thought maybe it was magic.”

“A magic trick, that’s what,” roared Mr. Lippett. “But you’ll see, young lady, that tricks don’t work in this house. You’ll either get rid of that rabbit or find another place to board. Now scoot!”

Muffs turned and ran as if the dragons were after her. There was only one place she could go and that was back to Tylers. She could see the light shining through their windows and that helped guide her along the dark little road, over the bridge and past the swamp that seemed to be filled with voices calling:

“You cheat! You cheat! You cheat!”

“I am not a cheat!” Muffs called back to the frogs. “I didn’t take the rabbit on purpose. So there!”

THE FIRE THAT WASN’T

Muffs’ face was streaked with tears as well as dirt when she finally rapped on the door. Mr. Tyler came to answer it.

“Please, mister, will you keep my rabbit?” she said, handing him the hat, rabbit and all.

“Bless you!” he exclaimed. “Of course we’ll keep your rabbit but first you must come in and tell us what’s the trouble.”

Muffs came in. Mary and Tommy and their big brother, Donald, were seated around a table in the kitchen eating alphabet soup. Mrs. Tyler was serving them from a steaming yellow bowl and, when she had finished, she dished out another serving for Muffs. “Come here to the basin,” she said, “and wash away those tears. We can talk while your soup is cooling.”

That was all she said. She didn’t ask Muffs if she’d had supper. She just seemed to know that the little girl was tired and hungry and wanted nothing more than to sit down in someone’s clean kitchen over a steaming bowl of alphabet soup.

Tommy was telling the day’s adventures while Thomas Junior mewed about the table just as if he felt hurt that he had been left out. Mary added to the story and soon Muffs joined in and told about the rabbit.

Great Aunt Charlotte, who had finished supper long before, sat in her chair rocking and holding baby Ellen. The baby was asleep and would have been in bed if Mrs. Tyler hadn’t been so interested in the story the children were telling. Once she did say something about it being made up but Donald defended them.

“One thing’s sure,” he said. “They didn’t make up the rabbit.”

“I made up a name for him,” said Muffs. “It’s Bunny Bright Eyes.”

“And a bright little rabbit he is too,” agreed Donald, “to get inside the hat without your knowing it.”

“Mr. Lippett says I played a trick,” Muffs told him sorrowfully. “But _I_ wasn’t playing any trick. It was Bunny Bright Eyes played a trick on me.”

Mrs. Tyler had to laugh at this, but Great Aunt Charlotte kept looking at Muffins as if she were not telling the truth. Mary and Tommy didn’t say anything because they were busy eating the alphabet soup. Muffs ate her soup too and a little while after that Mr. Tyler came in again.

“The rabbit’s all fixed up for the night,” he said. “I put him in an A-coop until someone comes for him.”

Muffs wanted to ask what an A-coop was but just then it was decided that Donald should go for her things and, if Mr. and Mrs. Lippett were willing, make arrangements for her to sleep all night with Mary.

“She’s far too tired to walk back there herself,” Mrs. Tyler said. Then she showed Muffs the high bed where she and Mary were to sleep and told her Mary would be up as soon as she had finished drying the dishes.

Muffs undressed herself quickly and slid between the blankets. She lay there listening to the clatter of dishes downstairs and thinking. At first she thought it was strange that she had been sent to bed ahead of Mary. Then she thought how tired she was and how warm the alphabet soup made her feel. Maybe the letters spelled w-a-r-m down in her stomach. They ought to spell s-l-e-e-p. The rabbit was probably asleep now in his A-coop. What a funny name! Muffs made up a little song about it and sung it to herself. The song went like this:

A-coop, B-coop, could there be a C-coop? Could a rabbit in a C-coop See a little girl eating alphabet soup In an A-coop, B-coop, C-coop, D-coop ...

and so on clear through the alphabet.

It wasn’t a very sensible song but people don’t often think sensible things when they’re almost asleep. All night long Muffs dreamed about her mother. They went shopping together on the subway the way they often did at home. How she loved that! She would scramble for the front train so that she could look out of the window and play she was flying. There were all the colored lights along the tracks. They flashed green, telling the train to go; then big and red, telling the train to stop.

Muffs sat up in bed. That big red light wasn’t a stop light at all. It was shining right in her eyes. Opening her mouth, she screamed, “Fire!” and was going to scream it again but Tommy clapped his hand over her lips and she could only whisper, “What’s the matter?” through his fingers.

“The Public Notice. It’s got to have our names on it or the Bramble Bush Man won’t know where to come for his glasses. Don’t you see?”

Muffs didn’t see very well because she was too sleepy. Besides, the lantern Tommy was holding blinded her and she couldn’t quite get over the feeling that it was really a fire. Mary, who had somehow managed to creep into bed without disturbing Muffs, was now asleep herself and even Tommy’s Shaking wouldn’t rouse her.

“Wake up, Mary! Come on, Muffs!” Tommy was calling in an excited voice. “We could fix it up now and get back before anyone missed us in the morning.”

Mary turned over in the bed and didn’t answer.

“Take that light out of my eyes,” said Muffs. “I was having such a nice dream about the cars when you woke me up. My mother sold some of her pictures and we were spending the money for hats and dresses and dolls--and--carriages----”

“But Muffs! We’ve got to fix up the public notice,” cried Tommy. “We’ve got to put in about the rabbit too or it wouldn’t be fair.”

“He’s asleep--in an A-coop. What’s an A-coop, Tommy?”

But Muffs went back to sleep while he was telling her and didn’t know the answer until morning. Mrs. Tyler’s voice calling Tommy sounded dimly through her dreams but at first she thought it was only her mother talking to someone in the studio. She reached out to touch the green and gold screen but her hand found only empty air.

“Someone must have taken the screen away,” she thought sleepily. The room looked big and empty without it. Her heart felt empty too when she heard the voice again and knew it was not her mother at all. It was Mrs. Tyler and she kept calling:

“Tom-mee! Tom-mee!”

An echo came back from the big barn door and soon Muffs and Mary were both wide awake. Mary’s clothes were ready and she dressed herself quickly but Muffs had to hunt for hers in the suitcase Donald must have brought in while she was sleeping. She found a pair of green socks and a blue linen dress that was a little wrinkled from being packed so long. Her clothes weren’t like that at home. They were kept on hangers in neat little rows and her mother always told her what to put on. Mrs. Tyler didn’t tell her. She just kept on calling Tommy.

“He’s a bad boy not to answer,” said Mary impatiently.

Muffs had a feeling that something had happened to him in the night but she couldn’t remember what it was. Together, she and Mary went over to the window and looked out. There was Mrs. Tyler walking toward the barn still looking for Tommy. Right beside the barn was what Muffs knew must be the A-coop because a dear little white rabbit was jumping about inside of it.

“They call it an A-coop because it’s in the shape of an A,” Mary explained, “only there are too many bars across it.”

“I think so too,” Muffs agreed. “Bunny Bright Eyes must feel as if he’s in prison. Let’s go down and talk to him.”

When they were halfway there they met Mrs. Tyler and her eyes were red as if she had been crying.

“Have you seen Tommy?” she asked.

Muffs tried harder than ever to remember what had happened in the night. He had come into her room and whispered something. It must have been something about a fire.

“I think,” the little girl said in a voice that didn’t sound sure, “I think that he went to see a fire.”

Mrs. Tyler put her hand to her heart. “Don’t tell me, child! Whatever makes you think that?”

So Miss Muffet told what she remembered of Tommy’s visit to their room in the night.

“Were you asleep, Mary?” her mother asked.

Mary said she was. “But I woke up early,” she went on, “before it was time to get up and I did see Tommy through my front bedroom window. I’m sure it was Tommy. I could just see him through the trees and he was running along the big road so fast I thought he must be going to see a fire.”

“But he would have told us--” his mother started to say.

“Not if he thought you wouldn’t let him go.”

“He’s a good boy, Mary,” said Mrs. Tyler and all at once she was crying again and saying between sobs, “Suppose he’s been hurt! Oh, my poor little boy!”

Mary went over and put her arm around her mother and pressed her own cheek against that other cheek where the tears were.

“Don’t cry, Mom,” she said. “We’ll go and get him. Maybe he’s still watching the fire.”

“You are a comfort,” said Mrs. Tyler. “Maybe you know what you’re talking about after all. Tommy’s gone and he must have gone somewhere. It wouldn’t do any harm to walk down the road a bit and ask about fires.”

THE FIRE THAT WAS

Muffs tried to remember something about the Public Notice. It was something important that she should have remembered before. Tommy had told her. He had told her in the middle of the night when she was too sleepy to listen. Now, after she had mixed things up and frightened everybody, she remembered all about it. She had told Mrs. Tyler that Tommy went to see a fire when it wasn’t a fire at all but only his lantern shining in her face. He had really gone to the Post Office to fix up the Public Notice before people came for their mail. He hadn’t hurried right back the way he said he would and, with things appearing and disappearing the way they did, something terrible might have happened to him.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” thought Muffs. “What a perfectly awful mess! What am I going to do?”

She looked at the side of Mrs. Tyler’s face and wished that she would smile. Maybe she’d dare tell her then. She looked at Mary, walking along on the other side of her mother, and knew she couldn’t tell her either. Mary would argue and Mrs. Tyler would never believe that she had forgotten. It would be like her story about the rabbit. She guessed nobody ever would believe what she said any more. After that queer expedition to the ends of the earth she and Mary and Tommy (if they found him) would be like three children in a fairy tale. Only it was easier for Mary because she wasn’t afraid to argue with grown-ups.