United States or Morocco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For he knew there was not a moment to spare; he saw the giant beginning to descend the bean-stalk. However, it was too late the monster's ill deeds had come to an end. Jack with his hatchet cut the bean-stalk close off at the root; the giant fell headlong into the garden, and was killed on the spot.
And in our own islands we have them too, for the traditions of English giants, and ogres, and dwarfs still linger in the tales of Jack the Giant-killer and Jack and the Bean-stalk, and Hop o' my Thumb; and we have also the elves whom Shakspeare draws for us so delightfully in "Midsummer Night's Dream" and in "The Merry Wives of Windsor"; and there are the Devonshire pixies; and the Scottish fairies and the brownies the spirits who do the work of the house or the farm and the Irish "good people;" and the Pooka, which comes in the form of a wild colt; and the Leprechaun, a dwarf who makes himself look like a little old man, mending shoes; and the Banshee, which cries and moans when great people are going to die.
D She didn't pluck a rose, carolling, because even if, by some magic Burbankian process, Jack's bean-stalk had been made rose-bearing it would have been hard put to it to reach this skyscraper home. E If she had flung it, it probably would have ended its eleven-story flight in the hand cart of Messinger's butcher boy, who usually made his first Fifty-sixth Street delivery at about that time.
The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack's bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it.
So, after leading the giant a considerable race, he contrived to be first at the top of the bean-stalk, and then scrambled down it as fast as he could, the harp playing all the while the most melancholy music till he said, "Stop," and it stopped. Arrived at the bottom, he found his mother sitting at her cottage-door, weeping silently. "Here, mother, don't cry; just give me a hatchet; make haste."
It seemed to me that if they could put their necks together, they would reach almost as high as Jack's famous bean-stalk climbed. Very curious sights to me were the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, both of whom I saw luxuriating in great vats of muddy water. This hippopotamus is an enormous animal, very clumsy in his motions, and rather indolent in his habits.
The rising generation shall no longer remain in heathen ignorance of Cinderella, and Jack of the Bean-stalk, and his still more illustrious cousin, the Giant-killer! The sufferings of Sinbad, the voyages of Gulliver, the achievements of Munchausen, the adventures of Crusoe, shall yet become to them familiar as household words!"
"I am going to read Puss in Boots, and Jack and the Bean-stalk, and anything else I can find that doesn't march with the age we live in." With that parting shot at the new ideas, my old friend left me for a time. Having dispatched my note, I found myself beginning to revert, with a certain feeling of anxiety, to the subject of Miserrimus Dexter's health.
But Christianity, which retained such a host of pagan conceptions under such strange disguises, which degraded the "All-father" Odin into the ogre of the castle to which Jack climbed on his bean-stalk, and which blended the beneficent lightning-god Thor and the mischievous Hermes and the faun-like Pan into the grotesque Teutonic Devil, did not fail to impart a new and fearful character to the belief in werewolves.
For some months Jack and his mother lived very happily together; but he being very desirous of travelling, recollecting the fairy's commands, and fearing that if he delayed, she would put her threats into execution, longed to climb the bean-stalk, and pay the giant another visit, in order to carry away some more of his treasures; for, during the time that Jack was in the giant's mansion, whilst he lay concealed in the oven, he learned from the conversation that took place between the giant and his wife, that he possessed some wonderful curiosities.
Word Of The Day