Tales of the Toys, Told by Themselves

by Frances Freeling Broderip

"'I'll lay six to one, I do,' replied Sir Gerald, running eagerly out of the tent, with me in his hand. He did not exhibit quite the same amount of refinement as his noble young friend; in fact, he was more like boys in general, and lacked that perfume, if I may call it so, of high breeding which so signally showed itself in my earliest friend, Lord Adolphus. After a spirited contest between the two gallant boys, I was thrown over the marquee, and, after such a lofty and prolonged flight, fell exhausted, without the power of saving myself, into a little crystal pool of water close by. I heard my noble young playfellows searching for me everywhere, and began to entertain a deadly fear that I should be left in my watery prison. Luckily, the warm day and their game had made them thirsty, and they both came to quench their thirst here, little thinking of finding me, whom they had no doubt so long and vainly searched for.

"'By Jove, Dolly,' cried Sir Gerald, 'here's the shuttlecock after all!'

"'What a lark,' replied Lord Adolphus; 'it's been chucked into old Rosamond's well, and ought to come out beautiful for ever!'

"'I'm glad we found it,' said Sir Gerald; 'or perhaps there'd have been a row. I saw Githa count 'em all, and she'd have been sure to bully us about it.'

"'We could have given her the tin for it then,' replied Adolphus, 'only I'm so hard up just now. I owe a lot of money for sweets and tarts; and I want to buy a cricket bat this quarter. But hulloa, Gerry, how wet the beggar is?'

"But the dear gentlemanly fellow, soon remedied this fault, for he wiped me carefully with his own cambric handkerchief, and I was not the worse, except that my coronet of plumes looked rather damp, or, as Sir Gerald facetiously expressed it, "all draggletail!"

"A little sojourn in the glowing Sun, soon restored my feathers to their early beauty, as I was carefully taken back, no worse for my pleasant little gambol, and placed in the basket again, on the Duchess's stall. The hour of opening arrived, one o'clock; but, out upon the cruel Fates! long before the turning point of noon, lowering clouds had veiled the bright, too treacherously bright rays of the Sun, and heavy, drenching showers succeeded, ending in a steady downpour that promised to last out the day. Oh dear! What ruin and destruction ensued to the elegant erection of the morning! The marquee leaked in many places from the sudden violence of the storm, and none of the precautions, hastily taken, would make it quite water-tight. The unlucky visitors, with their gay summer dresses all sopped and clinging with wet, crowded in to gain what little shelter they could; and all was damp, dreary and desolate! The higher class, more fortunate than the rest, accompanied the Duchess to the Castle; the stalls were deserted in favour of the younger, and less particular among the gay party, and the marquee was only crowded by the more persevering vulgar mob, who were determined to have, as I heard one of the horrors avow, "their full pennorth," all they could see and get for their money.

"An evil destiny which seems to have fallen upon me early, relentlessly followed me now, and ruled my unwilling sacrifice. I was positively sold from the stall of the Duchess, by her Grace's own maid, to a rich grocer in the city, for the sum of sixpence! Oh, degradation indeed! Fallen, fallen, fallen from my high estate indeed was I. No friendly hand interposed; no better purchaser came, so I was ignominiously wrapped in paper and put in Mr. Figge's pocket. Nor had ruthless fortune yet done with me, for when I was carried to the abode of the Figge's, although I had been really destined as a gift to his only daughter, Araminta Philippina, I was, by mistake in the hurry of returning, dropped in the carriage, and although a vigorous search seemed to be made by the fine footman, he did not succeed in finding me, and I remained hid in a far back corner of the roomy equipage for some days. Had I fallen to the share of Araminta Philippina, I should at least have retained the small consolation of being incessantly pointed out as having been bought from the Duchess herself, and a faint ray of my lost station would have still glimmered about me.

"But, alas, on emerging from my obscurity, I found I had indeed fallen in life, and from the highest to the lowest, for I was now located in the Mews, where Mr. Figge's carriage was kept; and having been found during its dusting and arrangement by the wife of the coachman, I was handed over to her horrible tribe of uncouth, ill-behaved children.

"Oh, for the language that I heard round me now! It made my very feathers quiver sometimes; and as for the flights I took now,—ugh—it makes me shudder to recall them! I who had bathed in fair Rosamond's crystal stream, was now doomed to be plunged in the inky rills that ran in the gutters round the sooty roofs. My beautiful red leather cover was soon dyed a dingy black; most of my feathers were violently pulled out by some of the younger ones, and the rest became somewhat of the colour of a London sparrow. At last, as a sort of release from worse miseries, I was tossed up so high by the horrid little flat wooden bat, which now became the means of my ascending, (and that in the hands of the coachman's eldest son, was an instrument of indiscriminate torment to everything animate and inanimate), that I fell on the ledge of a back window in one of the houses in a square adjoining. The boy, I imagine, did not dare to go round to the house to ask for me again, and was therefore reduced to his original stock of playthings, consisting chiefly of a mutilated ginger-beer bottle, some oyster shells, and a brickbat.