Little Thumbling
The smallest of seven brothers, a trail of white pebbles, and a pair of seven-league boots
Page 1
In the old days in France, at the edge of a forest so large that nobody had ever walked all the way through it, there lived a woodcutter and his wife and their seven sons. They were very poor even in a good year, and this had been the worst year anyone could remember: the harvest had failed, the village had no bread, and a cold hard winter had settled over everything. The youngest of the seven boys was the smallest person anybody in that country had ever seen. When he was born he was no bigger than a thumb, and they called him Little Thumbling, and even now that he was almost grown he came barely to his father's waist. His brothers thought he was useless. His parents worried about him most of all. What nobody had noticed was that Thumbling hardly ever spoke, and that he spent all his time watching and listening — and so he was the only one in the cottage who already knew what his mother and father were whispering about at night.
Page 2
On the worst morning of that winter the woodcutter took all seven of his sons far into the forest to gather wood, further than they had ever been. He and his wife meant to turn back without them, because they could not watch seven children starve in front of them, and they could not think of anything else to do, and they cried about it the whole way out — but that is what they meant to do. Thumbling knew. He had heard it through the wall three nights running. And so, before they left, he had filled his cloth bag with little white pebbles out of the stream, and all the way into the forest he dropped them, one at a time, behind his heel. Nobody noticed. Nobody ever noticed Thumbling. When the two grown-ups slipped away between the trees and the six big brothers began to shout and cry, Thumbling simply told them to be quiet and follow him.
Page 3
By the time the moon was up, the white pebbles were shining along the forest floor like a line of little lamps, and Thumbling walked his six brothers home along them, every step of the way, to their own door. Their mother heard seven pairs of clogs on the stone and came out so fast she knocked the bucket over. She did not say a word for a long while; she simply went along the row of them touching their heads, counting, and getting to seven, and starting again. And there was food that night, because the lord of the manor had at last paid the woodcutter for the winter's wood, and there was bread and bacon and milk on the table. But the money did not last. It never does. And a fortnight later the cupboard was bare again, and the woodcutter sat by the fire with his head in his hands — and this time, Thumbling's mother had locked the cottage door, so he could not get out to the stream for pebbles.
Page 4
The second time, Thumbling could get nothing out of the house but a crust of bread, so he crumbled it as he went, all the long way into the forest, further even than before. And this time, when he turned round to look for the way back, there was nothing at all. Not one crumb. The birds of the forest had followed the seven brothers the whole morning and eaten every single piece, and now they sat up in the branches with their feathers fluffed out in the rain, looking down at him. Thumbling stood in the wet bracken for a long moment with the rain running off his nose. He was not quite as clever as he had thought he was. His brothers were already howling. Night was coming. The forest went on for ever in every direction, and they were somewhere in the middle of it. So he did the only sensible thing left: he picked the tallest tree in sight, and he climbed it.
Page 5
It took him a long time, because he was very small and the branches were very far apart, and the rain had stopped by the time he got his head up out of the leaves at the top. And what he saw from up there he never forgot. The forest went away in every direction like a green sea, mile after mile of it, further than he had believed anything could go — and over on the edge of all that green, with the last of the sunset behind it, there was a light. One single yellow light, in a window, a very long way off. Thumbling looked at it carefully, and fixed in his mind exactly which way it lay, and then he climbed all the way back down and told his brothers that there was a house. He did not tell them it was an enormous house, with a window the size of a barn door. He had noticed that too. But they were cold and it was nearly dark, and a house is a house.
Page 6
They walked half the night, and the house, when they reached it, was far worse than Thumbling had expected: the step came up to his chest and the door-knocker was above the heads of all seven of them. The woman who opened it was eleven feet tall. She looked down at the seven wet boys on her step and put both enormous hands over her mouth, and then she whispered that they must run away at once, because this was an ogre's house, and her husband ate children, and he would be home within the hour. Thumbling took off his cap and said, very politely, that they were lost in the forest and that the wolves were out, and that he would rather be eaten indoors where it was warm. The ogre's wife looked at him for a moment. Then she sighed, and picked all seven of them up at once like a bundle of kindling, and carried them inside to the fire.
Page 7
She had just got them under the table when the whole house shook, and in came the ogre. He hung his filthy crimson coat on its hook, sat down, and ate most of a sheep. Then he stopped chewing, lifted his great red face and sniffed the air, and said the words his wife had been dreading all evening: that he could smell fresh children in his house. His wife said briskly that he could smell the calf she had dressed that morning. The ogre said he knew the difference. He got up, and he looked behind the door, and he looked in the bread oven, and then he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the table — and found seven small boys sitting in a row with their arms round their knees, staring back at him. He was absolutely delighted. He said they would make a magnificent dinner for his friends tomorrow, and his wife should put them in the good bed upstairs so they slept well and ate better.
Page 8
Upstairs there were two enormous beds. In one of them slept the ogre's seven daughters, each with a fine nightcap of white linen and a gold tassel. In the other the ogre's wife tucked up the seven brothers, in seven plain brown caps, and kissed them all, and went down crying. The brothers fell asleep at once. Thumbling did not. He lay in the dark listening to his own heart, and thinking about the ogre coming up those stairs in the dark to check on his dinner, and about how very like one another all children look in the dark when the only thing you can see is a cap. So he got up. Very quietly, in his bare feet, he took the seven brown caps off his six brothers and himself, and he swapped them, one by one, for the seven white caps with the gold tassels. Then he got back into bed and lay still with his eyes open and waited.
Page 9
The ogre did come up in the dark. He felt along the first bed, found seven brown caps, and went muttering back to the second bed, and there he found seven white caps with gold tassels — and so he picked up his own seven daughters, one after another, carried them all downstairs and tucked them into the good warm bed by the fire, where he had meant to put the boys, and went to sleep extremely pleased with himself. By sunrise Thumbling and his brothers were a mile into the forest. The ogre, when he worked out what had happened, let out a roar that bent the trees and pulled on his seven-league boots, which carried him seven leagues at a stride, and he came over the hills after them like weather. But seven-league boots are tiring, and ogres are fat, and by noon he had flung himself down in a meadow to rest, and fell asleep flat on his back in the clover with his mouth open. Thumbling came out of the hedge, pulled the great boots off, and put them on.
Page 10
The boots fitted anybody who put them on, which was the whole magic of them, and so Little Thumbling came home across three counties in about as long as it takes to tell. He brought his six brothers back to the cottage door, and his mother came out and counted them, and got to seven, and started again. And after that the smallest person in France had the fastest legs in it. The King took him on as his own messenger, because a boy who could carry a letter a hundred miles between breakfast and dinner is worth a great deal of money, and money is what Thumbling wanted — not for himself. The cottage got a new roof and a chimney that drew properly, and a cow, and a field of its own, and nobody in that family was ever hungry again. The ogre never came looking for his boots. He had taken quite enough teasing about the nightcaps already, and he had decided, all things considered, to grow vegetables.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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