“A make-believe story which is really true,” she said.
Beth gave a little sigh of satisfaction. The make-believe stories which were true were better even than fairy stories which never can be true. This was the story she told:
The Wood Baby.
Once upon a time, the angels brought from heaven a little child and placed her in a little house in the woods and gave her a plain old farmer and his wife as parents.
The hut in which they lived was small—only four bare walls, a door and a window. It was night when the angel carried the child to its new home. The child was asleep. It lay in slumber in the arms of its mother. The neighbor folk came and looked at it, and spoke dolefully of the cold, unpleasant world into which it had come.
The child awakened, but it did not open its eyes. It lay and listened.
“It’s only a poor bare hut with smoke-covered walls that I have to give as a home for my baby,” the mother was saying.
“It will find only work and trouble here,” a neighbor wailed. “It’s a hard, hard life.”
The baby heard, and being nothing but a baby and knowing nothing of the world, believed what it heard. It grew as the days and months passed. The time came for it to walk, but it would only creep upon the floor. It would not raise itself on its feet to look from the window. It would not open its eyes. It had never done so since the night that the angel had carried it to its new home.
Years passed. The baby, now a woman in years, moved about between the four walls which its great-grandparents had built. Yet she opened not her eyes; she never let a ray of light enter.