The Mysterious Stranger | Page 7

art; one could not remain doubtful
and timorous where a person was so earnest and simple and gentle, and talked so
alluringly as he did; no, he won us over, and it was not long before we were content and
comfortable and chatty, and glad we had found this new friend. When the feeling of
constraint was all gone we asked him how he had learned to do that strange thing, and he
said he hadn't learned it at all; it came natural to him--like other things--other curious
things.
"What ones?"
"Oh, a number; I don't know how many."
"Will you let us see you do them?"
"Do--please!" the others said.

"You won't run away again?"
"No--indeed we won't. Please do. Won't you?"
"Yes, with pleasure; but you mustn't forget your promise, you know."
We said we wouldn't, and he went to a puddle and came back with water in a cup which
he had made out of a leaf, and blew upon it and threw it out, and it was a lump of ice the
shape of the cup. We were astonished and charmed, but not afraid any more; we were
very glad to be there, and asked him to go on and do some more things. And he did. He
said he would give us any kind of fruit we liked, whether it was in season or not. We all
spoke at once;
"Orange!"
"Apple!"
"Grapes!"
"They are in your pockets," he said, and it was true. And they were of the best, too, and
we ate them and wished we had more, though none of us said so.
"You will find them where those came from," he said, "and everything else your appetites
call for; and you need not name the thing you wish; as long as I am with you, you have
only to wish and find."
And he said true. There was never anything so wonderful and so interesting. Bread, cakes,
sweets, nuts--whatever one wanted, it was there. He ate nothing himself, but sat and
chatted, and did one curious thing after another to amuse us. He made a tiny toy squirrel
out of clay, and it ran up a tree and sat on a limb overhead and barked down at us. Then
he made a dog that was not much larger than a mouse, and it treed the squirrel and
danced about the tree, excited and barking, and was as alive as any dog could be. It
frightened the squirrel from tree to tree and followed it up until both were out of sight in
the forest. He made birds out of clay and set them free, and they flew away, singing.
At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.
"An angel," he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and clapped his hands and
made it fly away.
A kind of awe fell upon us when we heard him say that, and we were afraid again; but he
said we need not be troubled, there was no occasion for us to be afraid of an angel, and he
liked us, anyway. He went on chatting as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he
talked he made a crowd of little men and women the size of your finger, and they went
diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in the
grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it, the women mixing the mortar and
carrying it up the scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our work-women have
always done, and the men laying the courses of masonry--five hundred of these toy

people swarming briskly about and working diligently and wiping the sweat off their
faces as natural as life. In the absorbing interest of watching those five hundred little
people make the castle grow step by step and course by course, and take shape and
symmetry, that feeling and awe soon passed away and we were quite comfortable and at
home again. We asked if we might make some people, and he said yes, and told Seppi to
make some cannon for the walls, and told Nikolaus to make some halberdiers, with
breastplates and greaves and helmets, and I was to make some cavalry, with horses, and
in allotting these tasks he called us by our names, but did not say how he knew them.
Then Seppi asked him what his own name was, and he said, tranquilly, "Satan," and held
out a chip and caught a little woman on it who was falling from the scaffolding and put
her back where she belonged, and said, "She is an idiot to step backward like that and not
notice what she is about."
It caught