Perspective

The illustrations for this episode of "The Lady of the Ring" can be found here, with many thanks to Alice C (Mrs M).



The lovely lady rushed from one corner of the courtyard to the next, bent down, pushing at the snow, shuffling the powder with her feet, rifling through it with her fingers, desperately searching for the ring. Finally, the lovely lady accepted defeat, sighed, and turned towards the house. She reached out her hand to open the doors and found, much to her astonishment, that the entire house had disappeared. Yes, it was simply gone, gone, and in its place, standing beside her feet, was a tiny doll's house. When the lovely lady knelt down on the snowy ground and peered in through the little windows she could see her tiny bed beside a tiny carpet, a miniature staircase leading down to the shortest of corridors, and there was the breakfast table and the kitchen. In the kitchen was a doll-sized bowl of eggs waiting to be broken and whisked, a plate of triangular sandwiches and an iced chocolate cake the size of a ten pence coin. At first, she feared that she may be dreaming, and then she feared that her past may have been a mere dream. Perhaps all of her memories of the house, and the kitchen, the bed and the food and the staircase, maybe they had all been a twenty-year dream. Maybe her reality was, in fact, so very small that it she could pick it up with one hand and walk down the street with it. Maybe she could pick up her tiny reality and walk all the way into town with it swinging from her hand. Maybe she could walk all the way into town with it and find a fuller house to live in, and in which to store the tiny house.

Well, dear reader, the truth is that the lovely lady did not actually walk into town that day, as the sun began to rise and the birds began to sing. No. The lovely lady was met at her street corner by a large horse-drawn carriage which took her all the way into the big city together with a collection of other people from her local neighbourhood. The lovely lady’s eyes opened wide with wonder as she looked at each of her fellow travellers in turn, noticing the clothes they were wearing and the objects they were carrying, and all the time shaking her head in amazement that she had lived for so long in her big-little house with the Mother Ring and had never ever seen such living creatures before.