The Realm of Imagination

by Ruskin Bond

  Hendrik’s breath caught in his throat. “Amazing!” he almost shouted. “He’s enormous! The horns — they have five joints. And his sharp nose has a hole in its point — how marvelous!” Aided by the powerful lens, Hendrik saw that the louse’s armor was not smooth as he supposed, but rough and dented. “Remarkable!” His heart beat faster with each new discovery.

  “Father, I believe you’ve met your match!” Maria said as she entered the room with a tray. “Shall we eat?”

  Normally, the gingery smell of hutsepot brought Hendrik running to the dinner table, but at that moment he barely noticed the steaming bowls of stew. “Forgive me, but may I examine this specimen for a few minutes more?”

  Maria exchanged amused glances with her father. “Perhaps the stew needs cooling, after all.”

  Mynheer Leeuwenhoek, who had once again raised the jar of cloudy liquid toward the fading light, grinned and added, “If we’re not going to eat right away, I might steal a quick glimpse of my newest specimen.”

  “Ever since you collected that lake water from Berkelse Mere, you’ve been itching to see what’s in the filthy stuff,” Maria said. “Go ahead — I’ll fetch your strongest new magnifier and one of the glass pipettes you made.”

  With great effort, Hendrik pulled himself away from the louse and glanced at the jar of scummy water. “What makes it so green, sir?”

  “I don’t know. It isn’t always this color. In winter, the water from Berkelse Mere is quite clear, but in the warmer months, it turns cloudy and green. Some people call it honeydew and believe the dews cause the change.”

  “But you think they’re wrong?”

  “I think one should never accept a belief as fact, but be curious enough to test it!”

  Intrigued, Hendrik laid the louse aside and watched Mynheer Leeuwenhoek suck a drop of lake water the size of a millet seed up through the pipette, which was thin as a horse hair. The draper glued the pipette to the rod of the magnifying instrument.

  Maria scurried to light a candle in the darkening room. The hutsepot sat cold and forgotten.

  When the glue had dried enough to position the instrument upright, Mynheer Leeuwenhoek pressed it close to his eager eye, and Maria and Hendrik held their breath. For several moments, they watched his features twist and tighten as he fiddled with the rods, struggling to bring the image into focus. Suddenly, Mynheer Leeuwenhoek’s fingers froze. His mouth dropped open.

  “What is it, Father? What do you see?” Maria’s knuckles had turned white from clasping her hands so tightly.

  The draper continued to stare in awed silence at the magnified drop of water. Finally he whispered, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d scarce believe it!”

  Hendrik’s heart pumped faster. “Seen what, sir?” He shoved his hands into his pockets, resisting the urge to grab the instrument from Mynheer Leeuwenhoek.

  “Animalcules!” the draper whispered in shock. “They’re swimming — oh, ’tis wonderful to see!”

  Maria gasped. “You see creatures in that drop of water?”

  Her father dragged his eye away from the magnifier and blinked at Maria and Hendrik. He swallowed with difficulty and cleared his throat. “I may very well be the first person in the world to see such creatures! That new lens is my strongest. I calculate that those animalcules are at least one thousand times smaller than the mite, which is the tiniest creature I’ve observed!” Before he finished talking, he had already raised the instrument back to his eye, gaping at what he saw through its lens.

  The last sands in the hourglass fell to the bottom. Maria lit more candles.

  Hendrik could not stand still. Biting his lip, he paced the room with his hands fidgeting in his pockets as Mynheer Leeuwenhoek studied the strange creatures. Hendrik had to see for himself. Finally, his words burst forth like steam from a kettle. “Sir, I must see these animalcules you speak of!”

  The draper and his daughter turned startled faces toward him.

  “If I may,” he added with a sheepish grin.

  Mynheer Leeuwenhoek raised one eyebrow. “See, Maria, he does not accept my opinion as fact, but must test it, out of curiosity. This is good!” He smiled and handed the magnifier to Hendrik. “Tell us what you see.”

  A wind of excitement swept over Hendrik, as if he were an explorer at sea on the brink of discovering new lands. Instead of a telescope, he held the magnifier. The flicker of candlelight teased his eyes as he adjusted his position, searching for just the right angle.

  “I see them!” he cried. His heart beat against his chest like waves pounding the side of a ship. “They’re beautiful!”

  “What do they look like?” Maria asked.

  “Some are transparent, and others are green and white. Oh, I see some sparkling ones with green scales and some that are dove-gray!” The words tumbled from Hendrik like a gushing waterfall. “I see round and oval ones. The animalcules have two little legs near their heads and two fins at their other ends, and there are coiled green streaks and greenish globs. Extraordinary!”

  A lump rose to Hendrik’s throat. The animalcules’ simple beauty and the fact that he was one of the first people ever to see this beauty made his heart feel as if it might burst. The magnified image grew blurry as water rose to his eyes.

  He turned to Mynheer Leeuwenhoek, who was preparing lake water specimens for Maria and himself. “Thank you, sir,” Hendrik whispered.

  Mynheer Leeuwenhoek held out his hand. “It is a pleasure to work with another curious mind.”

  Hendrik shook Mynheer Leeuwenhoek’s hand firmly.

  “Now then, are you ready to draw these fantastic beasts for all the world to see?”

  Hendrik could almost feel the large, smooth parchment in his fingers. Something fluttered in his chest like the breeze blowing on the banks of a newly discovered world. He grinned at the eccentric cloth merchant, who had turned out to be an explorer, after all. Hendrik’s heart made a giant leap. “Yes, sir!” He was ready.

  Author’s Note Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was born in the Dutch town of Delft in 1632, the same year that his friend, the famous Delft painter Jan Vermeer, was born.

  Leeuwenhoek made his living selling fabrics, buttons, and ribbons, but in the evenings he ground lenses, constructed microscopes, and made observations and experiments to satisfy his curiosity about the world. His homemade microscopes, or “simple magnifying glasses,” as he called them, were far superior to any others created in his time.

  Although Leeuwenhoek never held an academic position, he was accepted as a fellow into the Royal Society of London. For fifty years he made important contributions to science through the reports that he sent to the society.

  Leeuwenhoek really did hire an artist in order to send drawings of his observations along with his reports. Although the person’s identity is not known, Leeuwenhoek sometimes referred to him in his letters. He remarked upon the interest shown by both the artist and his daughter in his observations.

  Leeuwenhoek’s famous discovery of “animalcules” opened a new world of science and laid the foundation for modern protozoology and microbiology. In the Age of Discovery, when explorers canvassed the seas and astronomers scanned the heavens, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s simple microscopes revealed the hidden world right at people’s fingertips.

  Swing It!

  The Story of Peg Leg Bates

  by Darienne Oaks

  Do you folks mind if I introduce myself to you?

  I am the fastest dancing man in town.

  Just give me half the chance

  And I’ll prove that this is true

  When I swing this peg leg all around.

  — Peg Leg Bates

  If Mother Bates ever found out that he was dancing in the streets, she would “wup” him good, but five-year-old Clayton couldn’t help himself. His feet needed to dance as surely as his heart needed to beat. While waiting for his next shoeshine customer, Clayton rhythmically snapped his white polishing rag in the air, joyfully stomping aroun
d to its catchy beat. People walking by sometimes dropped a few coins in his shoeshine kit to show their appreciation. Clayton sure didn’t tell his Momma about that either!

  The money Clayton earned shining shoes was needed at home. His father had deserted the family when Clayton was three. Mother Bates struggled to make ends meet while raising Clayton by herself and caring for her own mother. A strong woman, she labored from “kin work” to “kant work” — which was often more than from sunup to sundown — as a sharecropper in the cotton and corn fields near Fountain Inn, South Carolina. On Sundays she worshiped at the Baptist church in town, making Clayton come along, too. Clayton deeply loved his mother and tried to respect her wishes, but her church taught that dancing was sinful, and dancing was something he just couldn’t keep himself from doing.

  When Clayton was twelve years old, he knew it was time to offer his aging mother more help. He’d heard there was work at the cottonseed gin, a factory where machines removed cottonseeds from the fibers, then crushed them to extract their valuable oil. At first Clayton’s mother refused to give him permission to work near such dangerous machinery. But Clayton hated sharecropping and, like a small child pleading for a puppy, constantly begged his mother to change her mind. Worn down by weeks of pleading, Mother Bates finally told Clayton she would take the matter up in prayer with the Lord. Next morning, she informed her son that he had God’s blessing to take the job.

  At the cottonseed gin, several buildings were connected by an auger conveyer, a long trough with a corkscrew-shaped blade along the bottom. The blade turned night and day, pushing cottonseeds in the trough from one building to another. Clayton was still getting used to the layout of the factory when, around three o’clock one morning, a light went out in the back of one of the buildings. Not quite knowing what to do, Clayton went to investigate. As he crept cautiously across the floor in the darkness, groping his way through the unfamiliar rooms, he suddenly felt his left foot step into air and slip down into the auger conveyer. The sharp blade, twisting like a screw, ripped through his flesh and began to devour his leg. Intense pain exploded through Clayton’s body. His piercing screams reached the only other person working that night. He found Clayton, stopped the machinery, then ran to get help.

  Clayton was carried home to his horrified mother, and doctors came to examine his injury. His leg was so terribly mangled that they had no choice but to amputate. They cut off Clayton’s left leg below the knee as the boy lay across his kitchen table. In those days, “colored” people just weren’t sent to hospitals.

  It took Clayton more than a year to recover from his surgery. He learned to walk with crutches, and then on a crude wooden leg that his uncle whittled for him. In time, Clayton taught himself to do everything the other kids at school could do, from baseball, to gymnastics, to horseback riding. Although the mill owner bought him a peg leg to replace the homemade leg, Clayton vowed he would never return to the mill.

  Determined that the loss of his leg would not stop him from doing whatever he wanted to do, Clayton experimented with dancing while wearing only one tap shoe on his good leg. Tapping with his good foot, he would work the bottom of his peg leg to create unique sounds and rhythms. Having a peg leg added an interesting dimension to his dancing, he discovered. At fifteen he began entering amateur dance contests. The audiences loved his dancing, and with his glowing grin and sparkling deep brown eyes, he won first prize in every contest he entered.

  Clayton made up his mind to become the best tap dancer around. He had never taken a lesson in his life, but he watched the two-legged tap dancers and copied their steps. For hours every day, Clayton made up rhythms in his head and worked them out with his foot and peg leg until they sounded right. Combining gymnastic leaps with his dancing, he created an electrifyingly flashy step he called the “jet plane.” After a running start, he would jump high into the air, do a split with his legs, then land on the tip of his peg, with his good leg stretched out behind him and his arms wide open as if he were soaring. He finished his routine by hopping backward on his peg leg all the way offstage.

  To earn money, Clayton would hobo the local trains to dance on the streets in nearby towns. He danced alone, swinging away without any music, his peg leg providing a driving rhythm. But dancing in the streets was a very hard and lonely way to make a living. When he felt his routine was as polished and flashy as he could make it, Clayton decided to hobo the trains up the East Coast, dancing at each stop on his way to New York City, the dance capital of the country.

  In the 1920s, theaters in New York were racially segregated. Clayton performed in black theaters on the vaudeville circuit, as well as in the segregated theaters that were only for white people. Although blacks were not allowed in these theaters, white performers would blacken their faces with burnt cork to entertain the white audiences by impersonating the singing and dancing of African Americans. Never allowing physical or racial barriers to get in his way, Peg Leg also performed “black-faced” in the early part of his career, so the white audiences wouldn’t know he was really a black man. As his popularity grew, Clayton stopped rubbing his face with the burnt cork and became Peg Leg Bates, the legendary black, one-legged, tap dancing man!

  Clayton began to dance with other well-known black entertainers, including the famous Bill Bojangles, with whom he toured Europe, creating a clever three-legged tapping routine that thrilled audiences in Paris. A very dapper dresser, Clayton had fifteen peg legs made to match his suits. He was in such demand as a tap dancer that some days he’d have to change his suit three times, adding the matching peg leg for each outfit. Audiences found his act so stupefying that they would leap to their feet, whistling and shouting “MORE! MORE!” He entertained the king and queen of England, performed with the great Louis Armstrong, toured with the Harlem Globe Trotters basketball team, and danced at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. He was the first African-American to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, one of the most popular television shows of the 1950s and 1960s, on which he appeared an astonishing twenty-two times. During the Korean War in the early 1950s, Peg Leg spent a lot of time visiting and performing for wounded soldiers who had lost legs or arms. When he tapped for young children in the New York State schools, he told them, “Remember, you can do anything you want to, providing you want to bad enough.”

  Clayton danced for fifty-two years, right into his sixties. He died in 1998, at the age of ninety-one, convinced that losing his leg was God’s way of giving him his character and a unique dancing style. Peg Leg danced with a beaming smile, sharing his unwavering determination with people of all ages, colors, and cultures. “Always go with your heart,” he advised. By following his own heart, Peg Leg spread more than just the joy of tapping. When people watched him, their hearts danced warmly with inspiration, filled with the exciting feeling that they could swing it, too!

  Life mean do your best with all your

  might with what you’ve got.

  I’m not sorry nor unhappy that I lost this leg.

  So please, don’t sympathize with me

  For I enjoy my peg.

  — Peg Leg Bates

  Little Brother of War

  by Judy Dodge Cummings

  Illustrated by Suling Wang

  Dyami raced toward the wooden posts shimmering in the moonlight, his feet skimming over the field as though he could fly like the eagle for which he was named. Sweat-sodden hair clung to his eyes, clouding his vision. His lungs burned, but still Dyami ran, the ball gripped in the net at the end of his stick. A thin, pale figure appeared beyond the posts as he drew nearer. Even in the dim light of the moon, Dyami knew it was Anan, his mother, weakened and shrunken by her illness. He must reach her before it was too late! As Anan beseechingly stretched out a hand to her son, he swung the stick behind his shoulder and hurled the ball through the goal.

  Dyami woke with a start. The longhouse was silent as a tomb. Beside the long row of shared hearths that divided the dwelling, Snake clan families slumbered i
n furs. Dyami glanced to his right. His father’s furs were empty. Once again, Aystan had risen before the sun.

  Dyami rubbed his flat stomach. For the first time in many mornings, he felt free of the anxiety that had been gnawing him. His dream last night had changed everything.

  “I will save Anan,” he whispered fiercely.

  As Dyami approached his mother’s sleeping mat, the odor of her sickness assaulted him. Her face was pale as a corpse, her breathing ragged. Dyami poured a mixture of bee balm and bloodroot into Anan’s mouth. She tossed restlessly, her body burning with fever. He rubbed her limp hand.

  “I had a dream last night, Anan,” he whispered. “I will play Little Brother of War today, and fly like an eagle and defeat our opponents. You will get well then. It is the Creator’s promise.” He kissed his mother’s hot brow and strode from the longhouse to find Aystan.

  Mist clung to the trees as the rising sun winked between the posts of the palisade that surrounded the village. Outside the adjacent longhouse a girl named Hurit bent over a fire, stirring a pot of corn soup while her father squatted nearby, waiting for his breakfast. Hurit looked up eagerly when Dyami emerged through the cedar bark door of his house, her black hair flowing down her back like a waterfall. Although dazzled by her beauty, this morning Dyami did not stop to flirt. Romance was far from his mind. He nodded in greeting and headed to where he knew his father had gone — the longhouse of Goyogoin, the healer.

  “Absolutely not!” Aystan sharply rejected Dyami’s plea to take the field with the men of the Bear tribe in the great contest later that morning. “You are only a boy twelve summers old. Little Brother of War is serious business, a man’s game. Control of the beaver pond and the welfare of our village rest with victory over the Rock People.”