Showing results for "The Old House" in Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths

In the street, up there, was an old, a very old house - it was almost three hundred years old, for that might be known by reading the great beam on which the date of the year was carved: together with tulips and hop-binds there were whole verses spelled as in former times, and over every window was a distorted face cut out in the beam. The one story stood forward a great way over the other; and directly under the eaves was a leaden spout with a dragon's head; the rain-water should have run out of the mouth, but it ran out of the belly, for there was a hole in the spout.

In The Old House, a boy is invited to meet the old man across the street, and he offers the old man a gift of a toy soldier. The toy soldier, unhappy with his new surroundings, flings himself through a hole in the floor and disappears. After the old man dies, the old house is torn down, and a new one is built, but the toy soldier remains to be rediscovered.

"Don’t worry," they say, "there’s plenty more you’ll see." Then one summer’s day, there was only one, no two, or three. A heart-warming story of a fish on a journey across the ocean looking to make a friend! Where have they all gone? Surely he can't be the only one left? Or could he? Was he the only one that survived a fish apocalypse? Is there even such a thing? Or are they all hiding and just forgot to tell him?