The collection then crosses into “Sleepy-Time Songs and Stories,” and the air softens. Tennyson’s “Sweet and Low” sends the Western Sea wind over rolling waters to cradle a sleeping child. Gertrude Smith’s “The Sleepy-Time Story” follows two sisters, Arabella and Araminta, playing on the rug with their white kitty Annabel and their black kitty Lillabel, rolling red and blue balls until the clock strikes eight and parents announce bedtime. The girls run for their nighties and flannel gowns, the parents rock them on their laps, and the song “Now a nice little rock, and never mind the clock” carries them, kittens and all, off to sleepy-town. Eudora S. Bumstead’s “Go-Sleep Story” follows the same baby, Ray, but builds a cumulative procession: a dog in a silky white nightgown, then two kittens, three bunnies, four geese, and five chicks, each more absurdly dressed than the last, all arriving at the porch where mother tells Ray the rhyme that sends him under.
W. Grahame Robertson’s “The Gentle Dark” speaks of twilight as a kindly playmate who falls like a kiss; “The Ferry for Shadowtown” drifts from the fire’s glow to a shimmering windowpane lake where blossoms wave and the anchor is lowered at bedtime. “Hush-a-bye, Baby” rocks in a tree-top cradle; Wordsworth watches a kitten pounce on frost-touched elder leaves with an Indian conjuror’s quick paws; Josephine Preston Peabody’s “Late” describes a soft-footed Somebody who creeps up the stairs and smiles at pretending-asleep children. Laurence Alma-Tadema’s “A Blessing for the Blessed” sweeps across the world to count babies in palaces, garrets, and on cold earth, blessing them all to sleep. A dolly is hushed, sparrows are wished warm nests, lambs quiet meadows, and children’s heads the softest pillows of all. Margaret Vandergrift’s “Sandman” shakes white sand from a faraway shore across every color of baby eyes, and strews a duller sand for naughty ones who make him wait.
The bedtime sequence glides into fantasy: Robert Bird’s fairy folk riding crimson moths across the silver moon to peep at rosy sleeping faces; Thomas Hood’s Queen Mab, who circles good children’s heads with a silver wand so they dream of fairy fish and talking birds, but weaves her rings from left to right for bad children, who then dream only of glaring lions and ogres with cruel knives. A mother rocks her baby up through the air to a fairy land, then sails home again; Richard Henry Buck’s “Kentucky Babe” sends mosquitoes humming and the sandman coming to a little coon whose daddy waits with dog and gun in the canebrake; a child falls asleep clutching a horse and an apple and wakes a rich man.
The section pivots again with Eudora Bumstead’s “Wake-Up Story,” the morning mirror of the Go-Sleep: pump, woodpile, cow, top-knot hen, and a Red June apple tree each give what is asked, while Ray sleeps on until the world has prepared itself for his bath.
Finally, under “First Stories for Very Little Folk,” come the simplest tales. A mother hen hatches six chicks—Fluffy, Topsy, Snowball, Daisy, Brownie, and Spottie—who walk to a brook, see themselves, get rained on, and cuddle under their mother’s wing. A Lucy Fitch Perkins couplet trades compliments: “My frock is green. My frock is blue. You look pretty. So do you.” “Philip’s Horse” tells of a boy whose spotted rocking-horse carries him through winter in a sleigh with a Rough-Rider pistol—the secret being that Philip could never remove the saddle because the horse was only a hobby-horse.
Stella George Stern’s “The Kitten That Forgot How to Mew” is the chapter’s longest small tale. Peggy’s kitten, surrounded by dogs, forgets her own voice and can only manage “M-m-m-bow.” A hen offers “cut-cut,” a sheep offers “baa,” a horse offers “neigh,” a cow offers “moo”—each almost right, none quite. Even the baby in her high chair offers only “google-google-goo.” Only when a great gray cat appears and teaches her properly does the kitten remember her mew, though she goes on playing with the dogs in the soft green grass.
George William Ogden’s nonsense cumulative song piles farmer’s animals one atop another—cow, sheep, pig, hen, duck, cat—each more absurd than the last, the poor farmer’s troubles multiplying with every verse. Lucy Fitch Perkins adds a quatrain to a passing stork begging for a baby brother and sister. Ellen Foster’s “Time to Get Up!” sends city-child Elinor to her grandmother’s country house, where two dogs, Bruno the collie and Bounder the fox-terrier, decide to wake her early; Bounder steals her slipper, Bruno chases him, and the household erupts in laughter before the day’s romp in the garden begins.
The chapter closes with Sara Josephine Albright’s “Maggie’s Very Own Secret,” in which Mr. and Mrs. Squeaky, two little gray mice, overhear Johnnie plan to turn their empty-box home into a dolls’ house with porch and upstairs and downstairs, and what Maggie whispers in exchange—a whole slate of elephants—remains, the narrator hints, the mice’s very own secret after all.
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