Moufflou and Other Stories
Louisa De La Rame
language
(, April 27, 2010)
This volume of three short stories was published in 1910. Contents: - Moufflou - Lampblack - The Ambitious Rose-Tree Excerpts from the book: MOUFFLOU: Moufflou's masters were some boys and girls. They were very poor, but they were very merry. They lived in an old, dark, tumble-down place, and their father had been dead five years; their mother's care was all they knew; and Tasso was the eldest of them all, a lad of nearly twenty, and he was so kind, so good, so laborious, so cheerful, and so gentle, that the children all younger than he adored him. Tasso was a gardener. Tasso, however, though the eldest and mainly the bread-winner, was not so much Moufflou's master as was little Komolo, who was only ten, and a cripple. Romolo, called generally Lolo, had taught Moufflou all he knew, and that all was a very great deal, for nothing cleverer than was Moufflou had ever walked upon four legs. Why Moufflou ? Well, when the poodle had been given to them by a soldier who was going back to his home in Piedmont, he had been a white woolly creature of a year old, and the children's mother, who was a Corsican by birth, had said that he was just like a moufflon, as they call sheep in Corsica. White and woolly this dog remained, and he became the handsomest and biggest poodle in all the city, and the corruption of Moufflou from from Moufflon remained the name by which he was known; it was silly, perhaps, but it suited him and the children, and Moufflou he was. .............................................................................. LAMPBLACK: A poor black paint lay very unhappy in its tube one day alone, having tumbled out of an artist's color-box and lying quite un- noticed for a year. "I am only Lampblack" he said to himself. "The master never look at me: he says I am heavy, dull, lustreless, useless. I wish I could cake and dry up and die, as poor Flakewhite did when he thought she turned yellow and deserted her". But Lampblack could not die; he could only lie in his tin tube and pine, like a silly, sorrowful thing as he was, in company with some broken bits of charcoal and a rusty palette-knife. The master never touched him; month after month passed by, and he was never thought of; the other paints had all their turn of fair fortune, and went out into the world to great academies and mighty palaces, transfigured and rejoicing in a thousand beautiful shapes and services. ............................................................................... THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE: She was a Quatre Saison Rose-tree. She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charming magnolias for neighbors: they rather overshadowed her, certainly, because they were so very great and grand; but then such shadow as that is prefer- able, as every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of common daylight, and then the beetles went most to the mag- nolia blossoms, for being so great and grand of course they got very much preyed upon, and this was a vast gain for the rose that was near them. She herself leaned against the wall of an orange-house, in company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active, simple-minded thing, for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought herself much better born than these climbers, had a natural contempt.