Laura Ingalls Wilder examines the brand-new town of DeSmet in Dakota Territory, from one of her stories about her pioneer childhood, By the Shores of Silver Lake.
The boy in the wheelchair is Colin, who is restored to health in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. She appears above.
The left part of the water horizon is now an English river, in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. Rat and Mole set off on a boating picnic.
On the right the river has become Lake Windemere, in one of Arthur Ransome’s idyllic stories. The little boats belong to the Swallows and Amazons.
THE FIFTH SPAN
Robert Louis Stevenson stands at left, his hand on the shoulder of swashbuckling pirate Long John Silver, who steals the show in Treasure Island.
Beside him, Cinderella goes to the ball in her pumpkin coach.
On the right, leaning against the column, nonsense poet Edward Lear holds in his arms his cat, Foss. At left above, his Owl and Pussy-cat go to sea in their beautiful pea-green boat.
Opposite them is “Toomai of the Elephants,” from the story by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book. Kipling himself appears above.
The empty circle in the middle is the space where the face on the wall appears again and yet again.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for the permission to reprint selections from The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jakob Ludwig Karl and Wilhelm Karl Grimm. Copyright © 1944 by Pantheon Books, Inc., and renewed 1972 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
copyright© 1998 by Jane Langton
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