didn’t take advantage of her speechlessness to tell her off some more. Instead he did a little dance.
This had an extraordinary effect on the queen. It calmed her down. She sat watching the hare leaping about and her heartbeat slowed, her eyes lost their anger, and her fists unclenched.
Then something very strange happened. She found she had got to her feet and begun dancing, too, jumping and kicking her legs about just like the hare. Fortunately there was no one watching or they would have thought it very undignified.
The hare finished his dance. The queen stopped too, breathless.
“I’m quite thirsty after that!” said the hare cheerfully. “Could you fancy a glass of water?”
“Water? I don’t drink—” began the queen faintly. But before she could go on to say she never drank anything less than champagne, she found a glass of water in her hand, and, feeling suddenly very thirsty, she drank some.
It was perfectly delicious! The most satisfying, cooling, thirst-quenching drink she’d ever drunk.
“This is divine!” she cried, and drank the lot. “Lovely and fizzy! Can you make this drink whenever you like?”
“Yes, but so can you. It comes from the spring in your garden.”
“I’ll never drink anything else!” said the queen. “I feel so good! What can I do to express what I feel?”
“You know,” said the hare, and vanished.
The queen sat down and gave the matter some thought.
Then she rang the bell and summoned her chancellor.
“Good morning, my dear Chancellor!” she said.
The poor man nearly fainted.
“I have some instructions for you, please, if you would be so very kind. First, call back my gamekeeper and ask him if he would stay in my employ – at double the wages, of course. Next, I am going to open my palace grounds for one day every month and give an enormous fête. Everyone’s invited.”
“Everyone, Ma’am? You mean, ordinary people?”
“They’re not ordinary people, they’re my people. No expense to be spared. Especially for music. I want the best musicians, who specialise in music to dance to.”
“Your commands shall be obeyed, Your Majesty,” said the astounded chancellor, bowing low.
“Not commands,” said the queen. “Requests. Thank you, Chancellor, that will be all.”
The chancellor backed out of the room in the approved manner, but he was in such a state that he tripped and fell over backwards.
The queen helped him up.
“I’m so very, humbly sorry, Your Majesty—” began the chancellor, all of a tremble.
“Entirely my fault,” said the queen.
One night the magic hare was dancing and jumping about more energetically even than usual. The moon was full, and that was when he danced his best, so he was hurling himself about, trying to resist the temptation to use a bit of magic to enable him to jump that little bit higher than he could by himself. He managed not to, and did a really spectacular leap just the same, which carried him four or five feet above the grass that was whispering in the night wind.
He landed again, panting, and shouted:
“That’s the finest jump I’ve ever jumped, and I didn’t use magic a bit! What a rotten shame nobody was here to see me” – and suddenly he heard a tinkling sound.
It was like bells – very small, silvery ones.
He looked this way and that. He jumped a few ordinary jumps to get his head clear of the top of the grass, to see what had made that sound. But he couldn’t see anything.
There are lots of little noises in nature that only small animals would hear or notice. The hare’s world, down near the ground, was full of them. But he’d never heard one just like that tinkling bell-sound.
The fact was, in the hare’s ears, the ringing had sounded like applause. Applause for his Big Jump.
Well, it was a mystery – that was all. Life was full of them. The hare, who didn’t like not knowing things, tried to forget about it.
Next night, the hare was strolling down a lane when he saw a bright light. It was a car’s headlight that had been left on by mistake. A number of moths were battering themselves against the hot glass.
“Stop that,” said the hare. “You’ll bruise yourselves.”
“We can’t stop!” they cried in frantic little voices. “We have to reach it! We have to!”
He couldn’t persuade them, so he worked a small spell on the light, switching it off. The moths breathed sighs of relief and flittered away safely, forgetting to thank him. The hare, feeling a bit miffed, was about to hop off when –
There it was again! That tinkling sound, a little fainter than last night, but quite definite – like somebody, or something, saying “Well done!”
This time the hare was determined to find it. He searched through the grass along the verge, he jumped, he bounced, he called out:
“Who made that tinkling noise? Come on, out with it! Who are you?”
There was no reply.
The hare went to bed in a very puzzled mood.
The next day there was more work to be done.
Down by the river that ran past the hare’s home field, he heard the sound of crying, and rushed down to find a poor little cat with its leg torn open by a ferret.
Well, I say “poor little cat” – of course the cat wasn’t entirely the innocent victim, it had probably been trying to kill the ferret, but nevertheless it was a poor thing now because its leg was bleeding and it couldn’t drag itself along.
The hare had to do some magic very fast to help it home or it would have died there. The hare really could not bear animals dying, and did his best to save them whenever he could. He’d have saved the ferret, too, if it had been getting the worst of it with the cat.
After the cat was safely back in its own garden, with its owner making a big fuss of getting it to the vet, the hare (who was always a bit tired after a big output of magic) lay down in the sun. He had just stretched his back legs out behind and his front legs in front, when he heard that tinkling sound again.
This time he was on a clear bit of ground and it was broad daylight, so he could see much better. He snapped his head towards the sound, and suddenly he saw what was making it.
A pathetic little colourless flower was shaking its bells.
The hare hopped up to it.
“Hallo, Flower,” he said.
The flower had never been spoken to before. Its bells stopped ringing and it seemed to shrink down towards the ground.
“What’s your Latin name?” asked the hare politely and importantly. He loved the long names of plants and showed off with them.
“Haven’t got one,” whispered the flower.
“Your common-or-garden name, then,”