Well, she did not get up and dance, but she came very near it. “What does this mean?” she cried. “I made it just as usual. What can it be? Ah!” she added, a new thought striking her. “Toto, bring me the ginger and the soda; bring just what you brought me this afternoon. Quick! don’t stop to examine the boxes; bring the same ones.”
Toto, wondering, brought the box full of something yellow, and the bag full of something white.
His grandmother tasted the contents of both, and then she leaned back in her chair and laughed heartily. “My dear little boy,” she said, “you think I am a very good cook, and I myself think I am not a very bad one; but I certainly cannot make good gingerbread with mustard and salt instead of ginger and soda!”
Toto thought there were some disadvantages about being blind, after all; and after that his grandmother always tasted the ingredients before she began to cook.
Now, it happened one day that the grandmother was sitting in the sun before the cottage door, knitting; and as she knitted, from time to time she heaved a deep sigh. And one of those sighs is the reason why this story is written; for if the grandmother had not sighed, and Toto had not heard her, none of the funny things that I am going to tell you would have happened. Moral: always sigh when you want a story written.
Toto was just coming home from the wood, where he had been spending the afternoon, as usual. As he came round the corner of the cottage he heard his grandmother sigh deeply, as if she were very sad about something; and this troubled Toto, for he was an affectionate little boy, and loved his grandmother dearly.
“Why, Granny!” he cried, running up to her and throwing his arms round her neck. “Dear Granny, why do you sigh so? What is the matter? Are you ill?”
The grandmother shook her head, and wiped a tear from her sightless eyes. “No, dear little boy!” she said. “No, I am not ill; but I am very lonely. It’s a solitary life here, though you are too young to feel it, Toto, and I am very glad of that. But I do wish, sometimes, that I had some one to talk to, who could tell me what is going on in the world. It is a long time since any one has been here. The travelling pedler comes only once a year, and the last time he came he had a toothache, so that he could not talk. Ah, deary me! it’s a solitary life.” And the grandmother shook her head again, and went on with her knitting.
Toto had listened to this with his eyes very wide open, and his mouth very tight shut; and when his grandmother had finished speaking, he went and sat down on a stone at a little distance, and began to think very hard. His grandmother was lonely. The thought had never occurred to him before. It had always seemed as natural for her to stay at home and knit and make cookies, as for him to go to the wood. He supposed all grandmothers did so. He wondered how it felt to be lonely; he thought it must be very unpleasant. He was never lonely in the wood.
“But then,” he said to himself, “I have all my friends in the wood, and Granny has none. Very likely if I had no friends I should be lonely too. I wonder what I can do about it.”