Below is an excerpt from an as-yet-unpublished manuscript.

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Imagine another world. A different world. But at the same time a world not really so different.

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                                        The Pussy Willows

The sweet smell of early dawn was passing, but Brumbai had barely noticed. Something was not right. He was sure of it. But what was wrong?

The sun had slid down the side of the great fallen tree, reached below the window carved into its side, and set dew on the grass glistening, and still Brumbai stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, the quilt of dandelion fluff tucked under his chin.

“If it was the finest I’ve ever seen,” he was thinking, “why do I feel so uneasy?”

All night long he had asked this question and still he had no answer. He had seen Northern Lights before, many times, but none as brilliant, none as wild.

At other times it had been the delicacy he admired, as if some great being had taken flames from a good birch fire as they lightened to the lightest of blues, the palest of yellows and the very beginnings of red, and had placed them in the sky, saying to them “Dance, but gently,” and they did, flickering as they changed partners and moved gracefully across the heavens.

This time the colours were robust and opulent, the blues the colour of a Blue Jay’s shoulder, the reds the colour of the roses in his flower garden. And the dance they performed was more flamboyant than graceful. When they finally dimmed and died out, Brumbai wanted to protest, to call out, “Not yet! Not yet!” This craving for more puzzled him as much as the lights did. Worried him a little too, because he liked order, a place for everything and everything in its place, and this craving seemed somehow beyond all orderliness.

“Oh well,” he sighed, “I’m not going to get the answer here.” As he stretched in bed he noticed the sunshine streaming through the open window, and sat bolt upright. “Good gawlugs, I’m late,” he exclaimed. He threw back the quilt, jumped out of bed, and with the precision that comes with being a carpenter, he washed, dressed, and in a twinkling, made the bed.

It never failed to please him when he looked around his home. It had taken a lot of work, carving it from the inside of the tree trunk. First there was the living room, then the kitchen with its fine cherrywood table, and lastly the bedroom. He liked to think that he could keep adding rooms, if he wanted to, one after another along the trunk. He had almost decided to add a guest room for friends visiting from distant corners of Innerland. When building his home, he had wondered long and hard whether to give the rooms rounded walls, following the contour of the tree trunk, or to make the walls straight and square. Rounded would be more jolly, he thought, but then he wouldn’t have been able to hang pictures, and he had so many. 

Most were paintings of flowers that the beautiful Gullywug had created. She lived on the other side of the hill that Brumbai could see from his living room window. In fact, he had carved out that window just so that he could see the hill where, to please him, Gullywug had planted flowers — bluebells that came out in early spring, followed by dogtooth violets, and then the gorgeous red, yellow, and white yarrow. After that, summer’s giddy profusion: marigolds, wild bergamot, twice as tall as he, black-eyed susans, and the heart-stopping red salvia. Brumbai would sit in one of his comfortable rocking chairs after his workday was over, puffing on his pipe and enjoying the view. All in all, his was a very cheery place, and his had been a very cheerful life.