THERE WAS ONCE a little boy named Yvo, who woke up one morning in a perfectly strange house. He looked at the bed in which he lay, but he had never seen it before. It was a wooden bed painted green. He looked at the furniture, which was large and solid. He had never seen it before, either. Then he ran to the window and looked out.
Below him lay a garden flooded with sunlight, and in the garden he saw two figures in blue overalls at work among the flowers, but there was something strange about the figures. They were large, and moved slowly, and their hands seemed very brown and clumsy. When they turned, Yvo saw that both the gardeners were bears.
He ran back to the green bed and jumped in and pulled the bed•
clothes over his head. Soon he heard heavy steps coming down the
hall, and there was a knock at his door. Then the door opened, and a very pleasant looking bear in a white apron came into the room. Yvo peeked at her through the bedclothes, and her face seemed so kind that he was no longer afraid. "Your bath is ready," she said, in a deep voice.
Downstairs, all the rooms were large and cheerful, and the wall papers were green or sometimes brown, and the pictures were of trees, or of honeycombs or of bears. From the kitchen came the good smell of bacon and toast, and Yvo caught a glimpse of a very fat lady bear in a blue apron, stirring something on the stove.
"That must be the cook," he thought. "Everything is well run here. But what am I doing in this place?"
By this time Yvo was hungry and naturally he was glad to sit
down to a delicious breakfast.
As the days went on, Yvo knew that he liked living with the bears very much. They were always polite and always kind. The garden and stables were filled with things that interested him, and when it rained he found many books of adventure and a shelf piled with games. There was a young bear about his own size who was the page boy and ran errands. When he was not busy, he would play ping pong and shuffleboard with Yvo indoors, or, on pleasant days, tennis, which he could play with remarkable speed, for, like all bears, he could move very fast when he wanted to.
Yvo enjoyed himself, but he discovered that the bears, them• selves, had one great sorrow. They did not like being bears. The house was an old one, and shook when they walked, and that made them feel awkward and ashamed. Then there were mice and rats in the house, and that seemed to bother them. In fact, they often spoke about how much they disliked being bears, especially the cook, who sometimes had dreams that she was something else.
One cold winter night they were all gathered about the open fire, listening to the wind howl in the chimney while they toasted marsh• mallows. Suddenly the cook said,
"Do you remember in the library that big book full of enchant• ments? It tells all kinds of magical things, even how shapes can be changed."
"I know just where it is," said the waitress bear. "I always read its title when I dust the shelves."
But when she came to look for it, she kept pointing to the wrong book, which was always the biggest, heaviest, and highest book,
thought Yvo, who was scrambling up the step ladder to get them for her. But finally, under a pile of old magazines, the book was found, and, sure enough, Yvo, turning over the pages, discovered the spell.
"Are you sure you really want to be changed?" he asked.
All the bears nodded solemnly, and each ate another marsh•
mallow.
"What would you like to be?" Yvo went on. "Raccoons?"
The bears thought for a while and then they shook their heads. "Porcupines?"
They shook their heads again. "Deer, then?"
"I should like to be a deer," said the waitress bear, but the others
were not so sure.
The page boy and the undergardener thought they might like to be monkeys, but finally it was decided that they all would like to be cats.
Then Yvo very carefully performed the directions for the spell. At the end, a great roar of thunder sounded out of the winter night, and when Yvo clapped his hands, the bears turned into cats.
You never saw anyone so delighted as they were! They ran up•
stairs and downstairs, lightly; they scurried from room to room;
they chased away the rats and mice; they pirouetted, and stood in
front of the mirrors admiring themselves; they went to the refrig• erator to fill their mugs with milk; .they brought cushions from the windowseats to put in their chairs. Altogether, they were wild with excitement and joy, and it seemed to Yvo that they would never go to bed.
At last he went to bed, anyway, and when he woke up in the
morning, he remembered that something had happened, but couldn't quite recall what it was. He ran to the window and there in the garden he saw two cats in overalls working among the
flowers; there was a light tap at the door, and in walked a cat with a little frilly apron to say good-morning, and turn on his bath. As Yvo walked into the hall, a page-boy cat was sliding wildly down the banister. All the pictures had changed, too, into moonlight scenes, and little sketches of back fences, or fine reproductions of Egyptian cat-gods, and the furniture had grown smaller and softer.
But the same good smells came from the kitchen, the same good breakfast waited for Yvo on the dining-room table. It seemed a little different living with cats, but they were just as polite and kind to him as they had been when they were bears, and now they them• selves were happy all day long, for the floors no longer shook under their clumsy tread, and there was never a sound of gnawing from behind the wainscoting.
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