The first thing they saw was three other children scrambling into another window on the opposite side of the room. They started walking. So did the other children. They stopped and the other children stopped too. The wooden Guide bowed to another wooden Guide and suddenly everybody began to giggle.
“Why, it’s only us,” said Mary when she had stopped herself from laughing.
“Then,” said Tommy, “it must be a giant’s looking-glass.”
“Oooo!” squealed Muffs. “The Bramble Bush Man must be a giant. He’ll cook us and eat us if he finds us here!”
Mary looked hard at her. “Do you think,” she asked seriously, “that a wondrous wise man would cook and eat little children?”
“He’d be very kind,” Tommy added, “almost as kind as Daddy. He’d let us play with the things in this room just like Daddy lets us play with his tools in the carpenter shop.”
“Would he really?” asked Muffs. And then, all at once, she knew perfectly well that the Bramble Bush Man was kind. For there, on a long table, was a delicate cage of gold wire and in it a little white rabbit was hopping about and twitching his funny nose. He looked well cared for and nobody but a very kind man would trouble himself to take good care of a rabbit.
Other things were on the table too, things so strange that only a wondrous wise man would know how to use them; rings and hoops and balls and bottles and a deck of cards big enough for a giant to play with. They were all reflected in the mirror so that, for every one, there were really two, but Muffs could see only the rabbit. She had forgotten the Guide who lay there beside the cage with his tall hat askew. Mary and Tommy had forgotten him too. They poked their fingers through the cage to feel the rabbit’s velvety nose and then Tommy found an odd-looking stick and poked that in too.
What happened then was so surprising that none of the children ever, ever forgot it. The Guide gave one leap, all by himself, and then clattered to the floor, leaving his hat and glasses behind him. A small, flat piece of metal clattered after him and knocked off one of his arms. Then he lay still and turned quietly back into a stick.
The children were so busy watching him that, for a minute, they didn’t look at the table but, when they did look, both the rabbit and the cage were gone. They were gone! They weren’t anywhere on the table. They weren’t on the floor. They weren’t reflected in the Bramble Bush Man’s big mirror. They simply weren’t anywhere!