from children’s fantasy by
Carol Kendall

This page:

The Gammage Cup

The Whisper of Glocken

Category:

children’s fantasy

index pages:
authors
titles
categories
topics
translators

The Gammage Cup
by Carol Kendall

Copyright © 1959 by Carol Kendall

 1

“A place for everything, and the more things in the place the better,” Muggles murmured to herself, for there was nobody else to talk to.

 3 Wm. was the prickly kind who made a fuss about little things. Of course, he was very important, and very important folk so often were prickly, in Muggles’s experience.

Topic:

Importance

 4

There’s no trouble like trouble, Muggles repeated to herself, as she cleared the table.

 6


When you say what you think, be sure to think what you say.

— Muggles, Maxims

13 “The time to worry is when you know what you’re up against, and then there isn’t time to worry.”

Topic:

Time

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

top of page
The Whisper of Glocken

Copyright © 1965 by Carol Kendall
Copyright renewed 1993 by Carol Kendall

1 There is no more mouthwatering smell than fish when it is in a fish, but transferred to a human being, it makes the nose draw back. Particularly on a warm day.
4

I don’t want to play it out, Glocken shouted inside his head, but how could he bring the shameful words to his lips when he had been called a hero? A hero...! Heroes were woven of a superior fabric. Heroes went forward without question and with unafraid hearts and a pulse that sounded thu-rum, thu-rum, not pittle-pittle-phut.

5
Once upon a whisper-time—so it is told, but who would believe it?—the Glocken of Then could play the tiny golden bell to any purpose. And on a merry holiday he boasted that he could harvest a field of sarcen, and he did. But the bell would not pick up the fallen sarcen, and Glocken and the villagers worked not so merrily the rest of that holiday, and this I believe.

—Pretend-story, told by Glocken to Glocken to Glocken, from Then to Now

7 It was easy to be generous when you had a lot of anything. The pinch came when you had to divide not-enough.

Topic:

Economics

Crying over a skimpy meal only oversalts the little that is there.
If wishes were cobblestones, there would be no grass.

Note (Hal’s):
The last two quotes above are from Muggles’s Maxims.

— end note

14

But the idea appealed to him—a house on wheels that could be rolled from place to place. Quarrel with your neighbor Klop the Cobbler and move your house next to Carver the Toy-maker....

He suddenly shivered. How would you ever know you had reached home if your house could roll away while you were gone?

15

He would just rest here while he waited for the next thing to happen. No hurry about opening his eyes to see where he was. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to open them anyway; and if he was alive, he didn’t feel up to facing whatever had to be faced just now.

After a while it occurred to him that he had no business being dead. You couldn’t just selfishly go off dead, leaving your friends to their fate, and still feel easy in your mind.

19 And would he think he then knew all about heroes? Or would he see a hot, scruffy, unwashed, very much scared, not very big Minnipin like himself—a Minnipin thrust into heroism through no wish of his own. Like the true chime of the golden Whisper which cut through mountains, it came to him—the truth about heroes. You can’t see a hero because heroes are born in the heart and mind. A hero stands fast when the urge is to run, and runs when he would rather take root. A hero doesn’t give up, even when all is lost.

Topic:

Heroes

21

“They wanted to help us, though,” said Gam Lutie [...]

“In their way,” added Silky.

“I think,” said Glocken, “that it is hard to help somebody else without doing it your own way.”

text checked (see note) Jul 2005

top of page

Graphics copyright © 2005 by Hal Keen