Hop o’ My Thumb
Upon a forest thick and gloomy
A cottage, the reverse of roomy-
To put it plainly, just a hut
And nothing better—did abut.
’T was built of clay and roofed with straw;
The walls had many a gap and flaw;
The chimney wouldn’t always draw;
The floor was damp, the ceiling leaky;
With stains of rains the walls were streaky.
Around the hearth, where seldom smiled
A blazing fire, were faggots piled
As if for fuel-
Oh, mockery cruel!
For they were heaped from floor to raft-
-Ers as a check upon the draught.
The fires that used that draught to flicker to
Consisted only of a stick or two,
Enough to warm a mess of pottage.
Pshaw! why waste time
In spinning rhyme,
When one can easily contrive
To picture it with words just five?-
The usual “English labourer’s cottage.”
There dwelt a goodwife, and her goodman,
Who by profession was a woodman,
But was so poor and so prolific
(A family of seven’s terrific
To one whose trade is not first chop),
That oft when trees he’d limb and lop
He wished—his lot did him appal so-
That he could cut his own stick also.
But while he in the woods was hewing,
What, think you, the poor wife was doing,
Who had to sit at home, and see
Her children gather round her knee
With looks that, plain as words could utter,
Said, “Please, we want some bread and butter” r
What could she do but sit and sigh,.
While bitter tears bedewed her eye?-
His was the “hew,” but hers the “cry.”
Her household duties were but few:
When she had clothed the infant crew,
The toils that as a rule belong
To cooking, did not take her long;
They never tasted meat, to vary an
Eternal diet vegetarian.
And well we know, to rear a troop
On turnip broth and carrot soup,
And ne’er taste “pieces of resistance,”
Is vegetation, not existence!
Said the husband one night
As they sat by the light
Of a fire that for them was uncommonly bright,*
“My dear, we have got
One carrot—and not
A single scrap more to put into the pot.
We ‘re as poor as church mice, and there’s nothing much surer
Than that we every day shall grow poorer and poorer.
And what for our brats
Can we do, my love? That’s
The question that gnaws at my heart ‘like green rats!’
It’s long since we had any victuals to carve,
But now we ‘ve no soup
To spoon out for the group-
What is to be done? for we can’t see them starve.”
The wife shook her head,
And mournfully said,
“If we have not the food, why, they cannot be fed;
Unless we find heart to entrust them all seven.
To the Power that feeds
And attends to the needs
Of the wild things of earth and the winged things of heaven.”
Said the father, “That’s true!
It’s what we must do-
We ’ll take to the forest the poor little crew
By roundabout ways, all the more to confuse them;
And then, when we find they ‘re not looking, we ’ll lose them.”
Here the reader polite ’ll
Allow the recital
To pause while they ‘re settling a question so vital;
And I, in requital,
To make it all right, ’ll
Explain how my story has come by its title.
The last child that was born
To this couple forlorn
Was tiny in figure;
Not very much bigger
Than the wee dancing dolls that one sees in an organ;
Or rather, so small
That no figure at all
He’d, I think, have been called by Professor de Morgan,
But—devoted to fractions most infinitesimal-
That diminutive point which is known as a decimal.
So, though he was a boy,
And we do not employ-
Says the grammar that Eton lads always enjoy-
For the masculine omne quod exit in um,
They christened the little one Hop o’ my Thumb.
The father regarded the child with surprise;
And his mother, poor woman, shed tears for his size,
For she felt as she looked at her babe the misgiving
That so little a boy could but make a small living.
And as he grew older
Still every beholder
That he didn’t grow bigger at all always told her;
But then as some comfort they all of them found him
Possessed of great nous,
Though the size of a mouse-
For though he was little, they couldn’t get round him.
Now it chanced on the night that begins my narration,
When his parents were holding this grave consultation,
Sleep would not come
To Hop o’ my Thumb-
He was on the alert “a remarkable some;”
So he sat up in bed,
And there by the red
And flickering light that around it was shed,
By the glare of the log
Saw the cat and the dog-
She was poor as a rat;—he’d a waist like a frog,
Or a greyhound—but due to the absence of prog,
Not the presence of breed,-
He resembled, indeed,
He saw on her cheek a tear-drop glisten,
So he hid himself under her chair to listen
The nags that you see in a cab-driver’s stud,
Whose “points” are all owing to bone, not to blood.
There his father and mother
Too sat by each other,
Conversing in tones they seemed anxious to smother,
And he saw on her cheek a tear-drop glisten,
So he hid himself under her chair to listen.
Notes
* How it flickered and flared has been drawn con amore
By that notable artist of artists, G. Dore.