Page 115 - Blue Feather Book 1

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adapted by arthUr ransome
Baba Yaga and the Little Girl with the Kind Heart
ONCE upon a time, in a village in Russia, a widowed old man lived in a hut with his young daughter. They weren’t rich, but they lived merrily together, as they sang songs and told stories of times gone by. In the afternoons, they drank their glasses of tea over a table piled high with bread and jam. Everything went well with them until the old man took it into his head to marry again. And after that, everything changed.
The new stepmother did not like the little girl, and said that everything that went wrong was the girl’s fault. The old man foolishly believed his new wife, and so there were no more kind words for his daughter. “You are too naughty to sit at the table,” the stepmother said each day, and she would throw the girl a bread crust and tell her to go eat it somewhere else. The little girl would go to the shed in the yard, and eat her bread crust there. One day, when she was curled up in a corner, eating her bread crust and crying bitterly, she heard a scratch-scratching noise. Out popped a little grey mouse with long whiskers and bright eyes. He sat up on his hind legs and looked at the little girl.
The little girl forgot about her own sorrows for a moment, and threw a scrap of bread crust to the mouse. The mouse ate it and the girl threw him another one, and another, until the bread crust was all gone. Then, the mouse looked up at the little girl and spoke. “Thank you!” he said. “You are a kind
The Blue Feather Literature First Course