"The Third Nest"

The Third Nest: A Easter Story

      It was a late Easter and an early spring. The combination had brought the festival of the resurrection into the heart of the bloom and blossom of the season, instead of the bluster and the blow. The shadows were already heavy beneath the trees, though the tints of the leaves were still delicate. Long blooms hung from the horse chestnuts.

Kirche St. Martin in Zillis,
Kanton Graubünden.

      Out at the water works grounds, beds of flaming tulips broke the level green' Persian lilacs flung out the sweetness of their pinkish sprays, and the snow ball bushes were masses of cream-white. From neighboring grounds came the heavy odor of myriads of apple and peach blossoms, the apple trees almost purple with the density of their branches and blooms, the peach trees slender spears of pink. And, as a background, the glitter of Lake St. Clair, through the branches, until far off it melted into the sky.

      A boy with a dark, foreign face, delicate and refined in spite of his evident neglect and the associations of the street which the violin under his arm suggested--picturesque in the contrast-sat on a seat near a tulip bed. He was looking dreamily at the flowers. He loved them, and it was their attraction that held him there when he ought to have been playing his violin and earning something.

      The flowers made him think of the old cemetery behind St. Martin's church in Zuchvill, in Switzerland. There were so many flowers there that the tourists came from afar to visit it. All the headstones in that cemetery were alike-that was the village law-except one, a plain granite shaft, beneath which was buried the heart of Kosciusko. How often his father had taken him there and told him the story of Kosciusko. He looked at the glimmering strip of lake which he could see and tried to imagine that it was the Aare river, the beautiful Aare which flows through the valley north of Zuchvill.

      But the illusion was not good. Down on the bank of the Aare the violets grew thickly, and he knew there were none on the lake shore, for he had just looked to see; beyond the gleaming river there was the Weissenstein jutting out from the Jura mountains, stretching along the north, blue almost as the sky itself. There was no stretch of pine forest to the left either, and behind him no village nor beechwood-the beechwood where he and Marie used to gather beechnuts. Around him it was beautiful, but it was not the Zuchvill meadow. Oh, that meadow--there was something about the day that him feel like crying, and he had a queer, dizzy sense in his head. It could not be that he was hungry. A boy who has a good breakfast ought to have enough until supper time. He put his hand in his pocket and took out some change, only $1.22. His lodging, together with breakfast and supper, was $1.50. and today was Saturday. It must be that it was only thirst, so he went and got another drink. Then he resolutely drew his bow across the strings. Perhaps the policeman would let him play here a little while. There were a few visitors, he might make a few cents without leaving the dear flowers. Under the spell of the violin the illusions he had sought became clearer, the surroundings became more and more like Zuchvill.

      He remembered one never-to-be-forgotten time, when his father took him out for a little walk, his father, who lived in his memory as a great, big man, with a very black beard, and a voice like no other, so kind and so caressing.

      As they walked along, his father told him stories of Poland, beautiful, suffering Poland, from which he was exiled. Some day it should be free-then he would take his little son up in his arms and kiss him, telling him to try to be a great and good man some day, so he could help to free it. And they two had walked along the Zuchvill meadow together--it was in the spring of the year, when the little flowers bloomed everywhere and he had let go his father's hand to gather flowers. When he came back his father was lying on the ground, he thought asleep, so he lay beside him and slept, too. But there was a difference in their sleep.

      He had not forgotten a detail, for over and over his baby lips had to tell to his mother the last words of his father, and she in turn had told him the reason of the tragedy.

      They were trying new guns at Solothurn, the city of which Zuchvill was really a suburb. His father, who had been away for a few weeks, had not heard of the proposed experiment, and did not notice the signs marking danger line. Daily his mother reproached herself for not warning him, and daily, also, she told her boy of his father until the memory of him became an ideal than which there could be none better.

      After his father's death his mother and he had gone to live at the inn, "Die Schnepfe." She was his teacher in all things and his companion. She loved the violin and she taught him to love it. The little Marie, the child of the innkeeper, was his playmate and fellow student. His mother left, just enough, by saving, to send him to school so that he might become a great man, as his father had wished.

      They lived there a long, long time, and it all was a long time ago. So it seemed to him, yet he was but twelve; and they might have lived on there forever, he and his good mamma, if it had not been for her brother. Here the boy gave his bow a vicious jerk. His mamma had been rich, but her brother had done something with her money, and even after that he would send her letters that made her cry. Here brother was in America, and one day she said they must go to him. When they came to New York her brother was in the hospital, his mother said, and cried. After a while he died. He knew now that it had been the prison hospital. When he wanted to go back his mother said she had no money. Then she had tried to get work to do, and they had lived in a little room in a big building, on a dirty street, nothing like the beautiful Zuchvill, yet it was good enough, so long as his mother lived.
       But she became ill and he sold papers and between times played his violin on the streets. His mother had said that it was begging, but when your mother is ill, what will you do? So he went on playing and did not tell her.
      When she was dying she had told him to remember his father's example and to be true to his faith and his country. She told him it would be better to leave the great wicked city, now that he was alone, and go to Detroit. She had heard that there were many Poles there. Besides, she wanted her boy to grown up where he could sometimes see trees and grass and sky.
      So he played his way to Detroit. It was only six weeks since his mother's death, but it seemed very long since then.
      He played on, Polish airs and Swiss melodies. He knew little American music. The Americans have no songs, he thought they do not need them. Only those who have no country and no father and no mother, who are hungry and homeless, can sing; or, if they have beautiful hills and mountains, as in Switzerland, to echo back the yodels, they might sing for joy.
      Out of the corner of his eyes he saw a little shadow edging steadily nearer. The shadow had curls, a broad hat and skirts, and then another smaller shadow in knickerbockers crept near it. The boy turned his head a little. It might have been Marie of 'Die Schnepfe," at whom he was looking, for just so he remembered her as she was when he and his mother came to America. He had been playing life into his memories, and the fancy seized him to make believe that this little girl was his old playmate. He smiled a little to reassure her for his sudden turn, and she, on her part, came a little nearer and leaned comfortably against a tree opposite him.
      Then he began playing a little song which he and Marie used to sing. It was in the Swiss dialect and composed by a friend of his mother's. It belonged to Zuchvill, and to no other place as much as did the meadow and the beechwood and the view of the Weissenstein.
      The girl's little brother toddled in between them, his brow in a puzzled pucker as he looked at the violin from different points. But Brunislav looked at her eyes across the little fellow's head and played and sang with all his soul. At the end of the stanza he broke out into a joyous yodel, and the girl yodelt too, high and clear. He was making believe that she was Marie and he feared to break the spell if he asked her questions, so he sang the next stanza--this time she sang it all with him.
      There was a bond between them now, and he laid down his violin and asked in the Swiss dialect:
      "Where did you learn that?"
      "From father," she answered.
      "Does he come from Zuchvill?"
      The little girl nodded.
      "Were you ever there?"
      She shook her head. Her mother's injunction against speaking to strangers was severe, and she was shy. It puzzled her to decide whether this boy who sang her father's song was a stranger or not. She hesitated, with the usually fatal results. The lonely and homesick Brunislav kept on talking and she answered less timidly each time.
      "Did your father ever tell you about Kosciusco's heart?"
      She shook her head.
      Brunislav looked incredulous. She seemed far less like Marie than a few minutes ago.
      "Did he ever tell you about the Weissenstein?"
      She nodded. That was better, he thought.
      "Did he ever tell you about the convent down by Solothurn, where the children used to find the Easter eggs in the nests on Easter Sunday morning, and where they used to give us Easter cakes baked like little lambs?"
      She shook her head. "But," she said, "Franzi," pointing to her brother, "and I build nests and mother bakes the Easter lamb cakes for us. Does your mother bake any for you?"
      "I have no mother?"
      "Oh," said the girl, and thought awile.
      Bruinslav started the conversation again by asking, "And do you go out early Easter morning to whistle for the hare that lays the Easter eggs?"
      "No, we wake up too late; father whistles instead."
      Brunislav smiled a superior smile. He was twelve and she was eight, and he had a better idea who put the Easter eggs into the nests than she had.
      She went on: "Franzi and I came over here to see if we could find some nice, green moss for our nests."
      "I'll help you," said Brunislav.
      "Do you build nests, too?"
      "No."
      "Why not?"
      Brunislav tried to think of an answer that would not reveal his lack of faith in the mythical hare.
      "I have no place," he said, at last.
      " I will let you make a nest in our yard," said the girl. "Maybe the hare will find it there, if you put your name in it."
      He did not know what to say, so he was silent.
      "Don't you want to?" she asked, aggrieved.
      "I will if you want me to," he answered, gallantly. By the time they had found the mosses and returned to their home Franzi was hungry, so the girl took him into the house for a lunch. A few minutes later she came back with him, a cookie in each of his hands. Brunislav was still telling himself that he was thirsty, but it was very hard to do so and watch Franzi eating. Women are quick, even in miniature. The little girl ran back into the house and returned with several cookies and divided with him.
      The extra number of cookies consumed made her scrupulous again as to what her mother would say if she knew, and she wanted to hurry her guest.
      "I'll build your nest," she said. From the depths of her pocket she produced a stubby pencil and a bit of druggist's blue wrapping paper. "Write your name on this, she said, as if conferring a special honor in the color, "and I'll put it in the nest for you. When you come tomorrow morning sing "Am Morga Frueh.' Father likes that," she added, with feminine finesse.
      "Is you name Marie?" he asked.
      "Yes," she said.
      Some latent instinct of chivalry made the boy take her little hand and kiss it. Then he went away.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

      On Easter morning John Kulle, Marie's father, with a basket of bright-colored eggs on his arm, was looking for the nests constructed by Marie and Franzi.
      He found each with a label in Marie's very primitive handwriting. But close by there was a third. Strange, of what were the children thinking? He picked up the bit of blue paper, and the name on it gave him a creepy sensation.
      Brunislav Bernaski!"
      He had a European respect for the nobility, and Brunislav Bernascki, though that of a landless and exiled man, was a great name in Zuchvill fifteen years before. Moreover, he had heard of the accident and death.
      He went into the front yard and nervously investigated the lilac bushes, until such time when Marie should get up and he could watch developments.
      Presently there rang out, high and jubilant, "Am Morga Frueh," with its joyous yodel. Surely this was supernatural.
      Later, when Marie got up, she found her friend of yesterday talking earnestly to her father. He staid to breakfast and came back after mass, and staid to dinner and to supper, and the next day he went to work for her father, who owned a flourishing bakery, and stayed at their house for good, to Marie's delight.
      The teachings of his father and mother had been too stern to turn him only to music, and Brunislav is studying law. If he cannot free Poland, he can be the friend of his people in this country. Will he marry Marie? Probably. for The Saint Paul Daily Globe by Eugene Uhlrich, 1896

The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny

      The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a British children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter that follows mischievous and disobedient young Peter Rabbit as he is chased about the garden of Mr. McGregor. He escapes and returns home to his mother who puts him to bed after dosing him with camomile tea. The tale was written for five-year-old Noel Moore, son of Potter's former governess Annie Carter Moore, in 1893. It was revised and privately printed by Potter in 1901 after several publishers' rejections but was printed in a trade edition by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902. The book was a success, and multiple reprints were issued in the years immediately following its debut. It has been translated into 36 languages and with 45 million copies sold it is one of the best-selling books of all time.

      The book has generated considerable merchandise over the decades since its release for both children and adults with toys, dishes, foods, clothing, videos and other products made available. Potter was one of the first to be responsible for such merchandise when she patented a Peter Rabbit doll in 1903 and followed it almost immediately with a Peter Rabbit board game.

      The story focuses on a family of anthropomorphic rabbits, the widowed mother rabbit cautioning her young against entering a vegetable garden grown by a man named Mr. McGregor, who had baked her deceased husband into a pie. Whereas her three daughters obediently refrain from entering the garden, her rebellious son Peter defies his mother by trespassing into the garden to snack on some vegetables, losing his clothes along the way. While there, Peter is seen by Mr. McGregor and loses his clothes trying to escape. He finds difficulties in wriggling beneath the opening in the fence through which he'd managed to slide past earlier to invade the garden, and later finds that his abandoned clothing articles were used to dress Mr. McGregor's scarecrow. After returning home, a sickened Peter is bedridden by his mother whereas his well-behaved sisters receive a sumptuous dinner of milk and berries as opposed to Peter's supper of chamomile tea.

      Through the 1890s, Potter sent illustrated story letters to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore, and, in 1900, Moore, realizing the commercial potential of Potter's stories, suggested they be made into books. Potter embraced the suggestion, and, borrowing her complete correspondence (which had been carefully preserved by the Moore children), selected a letter written on 4 September 1893 to five-year-old Noel that featured a tale about a rabbit named Peter. Potter had owned a pet rabbit called Peter Piper. Potter biographer Linda Lear explains: "The original letter was too short to make a proper book so [Potter] added some text and made new black-and-white illustrations...and made it more suspenseful. These changes slowed the narrative down, added intrigue, and gave a greater sense of the passage of time. Then she copied it out into a stiff-covered exercise book, and painted a colored frontispiece showing Mrs. Rabbit dosing Peter with camomile tea".

^{More Related Content:}

• The Tale of Peter Rabbit at Project Gutenberg
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit Audio Book at Project Gutenberg
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit Digital Book at The University of Iowa Libraries (Flash)
• World of Peter Rabbit: A website maintained by Potter's first publisher Frederick Warne & Co.

The Runaway Bunny

"The Runaway Bunny" by Margaret Wise Brown.

Read Along by ReadaRoo Kids.

      Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was a prolific American author of children's literature, including the books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd.

      The middle child of three whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, Brown was born in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, granddaughter of Benjamin Gratz Brown. In 1923 she attended boarding school in Woodstock, Connecticut, while her parents were living in Canterbury. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

      Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher, and also studied art. It was while working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City that she started writing books for children. Her first book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers.

      Brown then went on to develop her Here and Now stories, and later the Noisy Book series while employed as an editor at William R. Scott. Her popular book The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Also in 1946, Brown wrote The Little Island and Little Lost Lamb, both under the pseudonym Golden MacDonald and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. The former won a Caldecott Honor recognition in 1946 and the latter the Caldecott Medal in 1947. In the early 1950s, she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.

      In 1952, Brown met James Stillman 'Pebble' Rockefeller Jr. at a party, and they became engaged. Later that year, while on a book tour in Nice, France, she unexpectedly died at 42 of an embolism, two weeks after emergency surgery for an ovarian cyst. (Kicking up her leg to show the doctor how well she was feeling ironically caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge and travel to her heart.) By the time of Brown's death, she had authored well over one hundred books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House" in Vinalhaven, Maine.

      Brown left behind over 70 unpublished manuscripts. Her sister, Roberta Brown Rauch, after unsuccessfully trying to sell them, kept them in a cedar trunk for decades. In 1991, Amy Gary of WaterMark Inc., rediscovered the paper-clipped bundles of the more than 500 typewritten pages and set about getting the stories published.

      Many of Brown's books have been re-released with new illustrations decades after their original publication. Many more of her books are still in print with the original illustrations. Her books have been translated into several languages; biographies on Brown for children have been written by Leonard S. Marcus (Harper Paperbacks, 1999) and Jill C. Wheeler (Checkerboard Books, 2006). Have a Carrot, a Freudian analysis of her "classic series" of bunny books has been written by Claudia H. Pearson (Look Again Press, 2010).

^{More Related Content:}

• Official website
• Fan site
• Papers archived at Hollins University
• Runaway Bunny Concerto website

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

"The Country Bunny and The Little Golden Shoes"

Readaloud from Grandma's House YouTube.

      Edwin DuBose Heyward wrote the children's book The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1939).

      Heyward was born in 1885 in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a descendant of Judge Thomas Heyward, Jr., a South Carolina signer of the United States Declaration of Independence.

      As a child and young man, Heyward was frequently ill. He contracted polio when he was eighteen, then two years later contracted typhoid fever and the following year fell ill with pleurisy. Although he described himself as " a miserable student" who was uninterested in learning, and dropped out of high school in his first year at age fourteen, he had a lifelong and serious interest in literature. He passed the time in his sickbed writing verses and stories.

• Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward.

The Tales of Uncle Remus by Jerry Pinkney

Get ready for all of the laughs, adventure and hip-hopping good times in this all-new imaginative and modern retelling of Uncle Remus' best-loved tales. Parents and kids alike will delight in the escapades of the most mischievous and clever Brer Rabbit as he gleefully outwits Brer Fox, Brer Bear and a whole cast of other critters! With irresistible and toe-tapping new songs and an all-star lineup of voice talent (Wayne Brady, Nick Cannon, Danny Glover, D.L. Hughley and Wanda Sykes), The Adventures of Brer Rabbit is sure to be a family favorite for years to come!

      Uncle Remus is a fictional character, the title character and fictional narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books.
      Uncle Remus is a collection of animal stories, songs, and oral folklore, collected from Southern United States African-Americans. Many of the stories are didactic, much like those of Aesop's Fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine. Uncle Remus is a kindly old former slave who serves as a storytelling device, passing on the folktales to children gathered around him.

Joel Chandler Harris

      Harris created the first version of the Uncle Remus character for the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting a column formerly written by Samuel W. Small, who had taken leave from the paper. In these character sketches, Remus would visit the newspaper office to discuss the social and racial issues of the day. By 1877 Small had returned to the Constitution and resumed his column.
      Harris did not intend to continue the Remus character. But when Small left the paper again, Harris reprised Remus. He realized the literary value of the stories he had heard from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would publish them. He found the research more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame.
      On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta Constitution. It was the first of 34 plantation fables that would be compiled in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personages, and serialized landscapes.

       Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit ("Brother" Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. The scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris." Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial.

      Harris described Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a major influence on the characters of Uncle Remus and the Little Boy. When he read Stowe's novel in 1862, he said that it "made a more vivid impression upon my mind than anything I have ever read since." Interpreting Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "wonderful defense of slavery," Harris argued that Stowe's "genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institution she had intended to condemn." In Harris's view, the "real moral that Mrs. Stowe's book teaches is that the. . . realities [of slavery], under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own."
      The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris published at least twenty-nine books, of which nine books were compiled of his published Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907). The last three books written by Joel Chandler Harris were published after his death which included Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910), Uncle Remus Returns (1918), and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few people outside of the South had heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and the dialect had never been legitimately and faithfully recorded in print.
      To Northern and international readers, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown." Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced."
      The stories introduced international readers to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school.... [We] found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life." The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages.
      James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced."

^{More Related Content:}

• Joel Chandler Harris, New Georgia Encyclopedia
• The Wren's Nest, Harris's historic home in Atlanta, GA
• Robert Roosevelt's Brer Rabbit Stories
• Theodore Roosevelt on Brer Rabbit and his Uncle
• Black father: the subversive achievement of Joel Chandler Harris, African American Review
• Works by Joel Chandler Harris at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Joel Chandler Harris openly available with full text and large zoomable images in the University of Florida Digital Collections
• Uncle Remus His Songs and Sayings from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• "Death Calls 'Uncle Remus' and Whole World Mourns", Atlanta Georgian, July 4, 1908. From the Atlanta Historic Newspaper Archive
• Remembering Remus - Frank Stephenson, Florida State University

The Velveteen Rabbit

cover illustrated by Michael Green

      The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) is a children's novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner. The book was first published in 1922 and has been republished many times since.

      The Velveteen Rabbit was Williams' first children's book. It has been awarded the IRA/CBC Children's Choice award. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children."

      A stuffed rabbit sewn from velveteen is given as a Christmas present to a small boy, but is neglected for toys of higher quality or function, which shun him in response. The rabbit is informed of magically becoming Real by the wisest and oldest toy in the nursery as a result of extreme adoration and love from children, and he is awed by this concept; however, his chances of achieving this wish are slight.

      One night, after the boy has misplaced his cherished china dog, he is pacified through the presence of the rabbit, who attracts more attention from his owner from then onward as a result, to the extent of his promotion to the position of the child's favorite toy. However, when the toy rabbit's owner contracts scarlet fever, he is prescribed a trip to the seashore and is pacified upon receiving a stuffed rabbit of higher quality as a replacement for the Velveteen Rabbit, which must be burned alongside all of the other playthings due to potential bacteria. Before the rabbit can meet a painful demise, he is greeted by the Nursery Fairy, who transforms him into a living rabbit to spare him from an agonizing fate, as he'd acquired greater affection from the boy than all of the other toys and surpassed all qualifications required. The rabbit accompanies several others in rejoicing, gleefully upon having received his dream.

More Related Content:

• The Velveteen Rabbit Illustrated by William Nicholson. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., c1922 at A Celebration of Women Writers
• The Velveteen Rabbit at Project Gutenberg
• The Velveteen Rabbit (flip book with original illustrations) at Internet Archive

 

"When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real." Margery Williams' enchanting story about a toy rabbit will live forever in the annals of children's literature, coming alive through this unforgettable rendition. " Told by Meryl Streep, Music by George Winston, Illustrated by David Jorgensen

How The Rabbit Brought The Easter Eggs

(Translated from the German)

      Once upon a time, many years ago, Spring had come back to the earth, and after a long, hard fight with sturdy, old Winter, had succeeded in driving him up into the mountains with his ice and snow.

      Then Spring walked through the bare woods, and under his feet little blades of green grass spring up, violets and anemones opened their dainty flowers, and out of the ground crept thousands of insects, rubbing their eyes after their long winter's sleep.

      Spring touched the trees, and at once the buds burst open and tender little leaves and blossoms peeped out of their warm winter covering. Soon large flocks of birds returned from the south, joyously greeted their old friends who had stayed at home and braved the cold winter. 

      Spring smiled as he looked around in his happy little world. Then he said to himself:

      "Everything is ready for the great reception, but where are the people? They do not seem to know that I have chased the cold Winter away. Probably they are still sitting around their stoves waiting for him to go. I must send word and invite them to come out."

      He called a little bird who was hopping near him with a bit of wood in his beak and said to him:

      "Birdie, I want you to be my messenger. Fly to the city and tell the people that we are waiting for them to go out into the wood and have a happy day with us."

      But the little bird said:

      "Dear Spring, I thank you very much for the honor, and should be only too happy to carry your message, but my little wife and I have just commenced to build my nest, and if I leave it now the wind will blow it all to pieces, for my wife is not strong enough to go building it alone."

      "Well, go and finish your nest," said Spring, kindly, and called another bird who had, he knew, finished his nest, and told him of the message he wanted him to carry.

      "Will you not excuse me, kind Spring?" asked the little bird. "We have seven beautiful eggs in our nest, and my wife is hatching them. If I go away she would starve to death, for she wouldn't leave eggs a minute to get something to eat."

      Spring spoke to two or three other birds, but he found it was the same with all of them. They were all busy with their own affairs, and he was too kind to send them away when they were so much needed in their homes. He looked around for another messenger when a rabbit ran across his path. 

      "Stop, little fellow," he cried. "Come here; I want you." He explained to him on what errand he wanted him to go. If you have ever seen a rabbit in the open field you know that he is the most timid fellow that ever was. At the least noise he starts off on a run and never stops until he reaches his home.

      He trembled all over when Spring spoke to him, and his voice shook as he said:

      "Oh, please, dear Spring, do not send me to the city. You know how many of my friends people kill every year with their terrible guns. I know some one will shoot me before I have even had time to deliver your message, and then what good will it do you?"

      "What a little coward you are!" laughed Spring. "But you need not talk to the big people at all; you can tell the dear little children. You are not afraid of them, are you?"

      "Oh, yes," sobbed the poor little rabbit. "They will throw stones at me and hurt me. I'm so afraid, please don't make me go!"

      "No, no, dear little Bunny; I cannot excuse you. But I won't let anybody hurt you. I have and idea! Come along with me and I will tell you."

      And they walked down to the brook, the rabbit trotting by his side, still trembling. He cut tender little twigs from the willow trees, wove a pretty little basket, and lined it with soft moss. Then he went back into the woods and looked into the all the bird's nests, and when he found one full of eggs he took one little egg out and laid it carefully in the basket.

      There were white eggs, there were brown ones, and there were eggs of sky blue. The robin gave one of her five blue eggs; the sparrow one of her brown speckled eggs; the woodpecker one of her white eggs, and the catbird a greenish blue one. Then Spring cut some pussy willow branches, placed them on top of the eggs, and tied the basket on the back of the rabbit, who had been looking on wonderingly.

      "Now, my little Bunny, we are ready to send our message. When night comes you run down to the city. Everybody will be asleep, so no one will see you. If you hurry, you can get back her before morning. You will not have to say a word; but on the doorstep of each house lay down one of these twigs of pussy willow and a little egg, and I'm sure all the people will understand what we wish to tell them."

      The rabbit nodded. He was not afraid to do that. He did as Spring told him.

      Next morning there was great joy in the city.

      "Papa, mamma, see what we have found." the happy children shouted. "The pussy willows are out; the birds have come back. Spring must be here. "Oh, let's go out to the woods."

      Everybody went, and such a happy time they had, gathering flowers and listening to the birds. This was Easter time. (The Washington Times, Sunday, April 23, 1905 - transcribed by Kathy Grimm)