Introduction

Twilight Land

by Howard Pyle

I found myself in Twilight Land. How I ever got there I cannot
tell, but there I was in Twilight Land.

What is Twilight Land? It is a wonderful, wonderful place where
no sun shines to scorch your back as you jog along the way, where no
rain falls to make the road muddy and hard to travel, where no wind
blows the dust into your eyes or the chill into your marrow. Where
all is sweet and quiet and ready to go to bed.

Where is Twilight Land? Ah! that I cannot tell you. You will
either have to ask your mother or find it for yourself.

There I was in Twilight Land. The birds were singing their
good-night song, and the little frogs were piping "peet, peet." The
sky overhead was full of still brightness, and the moon in the east
hung in the purple gray like a great bubble as yellow as gold. All
the air was full of the smell of growing things. The high-road was
gray, and the trees were dark.

I drifted along the road as a soap-bubble floats before the
wind, or as a body floats in a dream. I floated along and I floated
along past the trees, past the bushes, past the mill-pond, past the
mill where the old miller stood at the door looking at me.

I floated on, and there was the Inn, and it was the Sign of
Mother Goose.

The sign hung on a pole, and on it was painted a picture of
Mother Goose with her gray gander.

It was to the Inn I wished to come.

I floated on, and I would have floated past the Inn, and perhaps
have gotten into the Land of Never-Come-Back-Again, only I caught at
the branch of an apple-tree, and so I stopped myself, though the
apple-blossoms came falling down like pink and white snowflakes.

The earth and the air and the sky were all still, just as it is
at twilight, and I heard them laughing and talking in the tap-room of
the Inn of the Sign of Mother Goose--the clinking of glasses, and the
rattling and clatter of knives and forks and plates and dishes. That
was where I wished to go.

So in I went. Mother Goose herself opened the door, and there I
was.

The room was all full of twilight; but there they sat, every one
of them. I did not count them, but there were ever so many: Aladdin,
and Ali Baba, and Fortunatis, and Jack-the-Giant-Killer, and Doctor
Faustus, and Bidpai, and Cinderella, and Patient Grizzle, and the
Soldier who cheated the Devil, and St. George, and Hans in Luck, who
traded and traded his lump of gold until he had only an empty churn
to show for it; and there was Sindbad the Sailor, and the Tailor who
killed seven flies at a blow, and the Fisherman who fished up the
Genie, and the Lad who fiddled for the Jew in the bramble-bush, and
the Blacksmith who made Death sit in his apple-tree, and Boots, who
always marries the Princess, whether he wants to or not--a rag-tag
lot as ever you saw in your life, gathered from every place, and
brought together in Twilight Land.

Each one of them was telling a story, and now it was the turn of
the Soldier who cheated the Devil.

"I will tell you," said the Soldier who cheated the Devil, "a
story of a friend of mine."

"Take a fresh pipe of tobacco," said St. George.

"Thank you, I will," said the Soldier who cheated the Devil.

He filled his long pipe full of tobacco, and then he tilted it
upside down and sucked in the light of the candle.

Puff! puff! puff! and a cloud of smoke went up about his head,
so that you could just see his red nose shining through it, and his
bright eyes twinkling in the midst of the smoke-wreath, like two
stars through a thin cloud on a summer night.

"I'll tell you," said the Soldier who cheated the Devil, "the
story of a friend of mine. Tis every word of it just as true as that
I myself cheated the Devil."

He took a drink from his mug of beer, and then he began.

"Tis called," said he--