Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

I looked carefully all around me.

And I saw a most extraordinary small person, who stood there examining me with great seriousness.

Here you may see the best portrait that, later, I was able to make of him.

But my drawing is certainly very much less charming than its model.

That, however, is not my fault.

The grown-ups discouraged me in my painter's career when I was six years old, and I never learned to draw anything, except boas from the outside and boas from the inside.

Now I stared at this sudden apparition with my eyes fairly starting out of my head in astonishment.

Remember, I had crashed in the desert a thousand miles from any inhabited region.

And yet my little man seemed neither to be straying uncertainly among the sands, nor to be fainting from fatigue or hunger or thirst or fear.

Nothing about him gave any suggestion of a child lost in the middle of the desert, a thousand miles from any human habitation.

When at last I was able to speak, I said to him:

But--what are you doing here?

And in answer he repeated, very slowly, as if he were speaking of a matter of great consequence:

If you please--draw me a sheep . . .

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.

Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen.

But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw.

He answered me: "That doesn't matter.

Draw me a sheep . . .

But I had never drawn a sheep.

So I drew for him one of the two pictures I had drawn so often.

It was that of the boa constrictor from the outside.

And I was astounded to hear the little fellow greet it with, "No, no, no! I do not want an elephant inside a boa constrictor.

A boa constrictor is a very dangerous creature, and an elephant is very cumbersome.

Table of Contents