Piccolissima | Page 5

little one should be so very delicate; from the first
we called it Piccolissima; then, neither Mr. Tom Thumb nor I are very

large; and I am told that our ancestors were still more delicately formed;
what then is more natural than that this little one should be such a wee
wee thing?"
The tranquillity of Mrs. Tom Thumb had this good effect; it appeased
the curiosity of the neighbors. At last, like her, they came to the
conclusion "that it was very natural that the child was smaller than the
mother." and all went on as usual around our heroine, while she was
quietly rocked by the passing hours, and was amused with the sound of
the silver clock bell. When, however, Piccolissima was two inches high,
and lively as a grasshopper, she became restless in her cocoanut shell;
she was desirous to get out of it, to walk, and to jump, and she not only
deranged the clock, but she was in real danger.
She was now as much as seven years old, and she amused herself with
all sorts of little pranks, and loving ways, with one of her brothers
eighteen months old. The great boy, in a sort of ecstasy at some of the
drolleries of his little sister, seized her and put her in his mouth, taking
into it nearly the whole head of the poor little thing. Her cry was so
shrill that the baby boy opened his jaws and let the unfortunate
Piccolissima fall on the floor. She did not recover for a long time from
this fall. Another time, a large cat, a great mouser, ran after her, and it
was with difficulty they rescued Piccolissima from the claws of
Raminagrobis. The father, Mr. Thumb, could not repress some anxiety
about the fate of his amiable daughter, who had more than common
intelligence, and who, by her extreme smallness, was exposed to so
many dangers.
Piccolissima did her best to acquire knowledge. She had the best
intentions in the world; she desired in every thing to please all who
approached her; but her extreme restlessness led her away in spite of
herself. One evening she lost herself in the solitude of a drawer in
which was kept some tobacco; she came near dying from the effect of it.
Once she was near drowning in a superb salad dish of frothed eggs,
which she may have taken for snow mountains. She had a passion for
discovery, she had a prodigious activity of mind and body, and yet they
could find nothing for her to do, "because," they said, "she is so little,
so delicate." She could not play with children of her own age, she was
not allowed to run about, and without object, without employment,
without means of studying, with no companions, no sympathy, the poor

little thing was in danger of falling into a state of apathy, more to be
feared than the accidents from which they wished to preserve her.
One day, towards the end of February, Piccolissima had been placed
upon the mantelpiece. Her mother had gone out; her father, who did not
wish to have the trouble of watching over all his little daughter's
movements, seated her upon a pincushion in which there were no pins,
and putting the dictionary as a sort of rampart before her, he gave her a
stick of barley sugar to entertain herself with, and after the usual
admonition, left her to her dreams. Leaving the sugar to slip down by
her side, she remained lost in melancholy reflections from which she
was drawn by a light murmur, such as one hears sometimes in the
silence of the night when persons are speaking in a low voice in a
distant part of the house. Piccolissima listened with deep attention for
some time. Usually she disliked the sound of conversation; it struck
harshly on her organs, and seemed a sort of mimic thunder; but these
sounds had nothing discordant, nothing disagreeable in them, to her ear.
As Piccolissima had been forced to observe rather than to act, her
faculties took a new direction, and a development of which she was
unconscious herself took place, and her joy and her surprise were great
when she found that, in what had at first appeared to her a confused
murmur, she distinguished, as she listened attentively, intelligible
words.
"It was hardly worth while," said a small, sharp voice, "it was hardly
worth the trouble it cost me to leave my cradle. I have come into the
world where all is dead around me. Ah! if I had only known that this
world was so cold and dull, I should not have made efforts which
almost destroyed me, to break the roof and leave my narrow house."
"Patience," replied another