The Wishing-Stone Stories Book Reviews

The Wishing-Stone Stories by Thornton Waldo Burgess Book Summary

Tommy scuffed his bare, brown feet in the grass and didn’t even notice how cooling and refreshing to his bare toes the green blades were. Usually he just loved to feel them, but this afternoon he just didn’t want to find anything pleasant or nice in the things he was accustomed to. A scowl, a deep, dark, heavy scowl, had chased all merriment from his round, freckled face. It seemed as if the very freckles were trying to hide from it.
Tommy didn’t care. He said so. He said so right out loud. He didn’t care if all the world knew it. He wanted the world to know it. It was a horrid old world anyway, this world which made a fellow go hunt up and drive home a lot of pesky cows just when all the other fellows were over at the swimming-hole. It always was that way whenever there was anything interesting or particular to do, or any fun going on. Yes, it was a horrid old world, this world in which Tommy lived, and he was quite willing that everybody should know it.
The truth was, Tommy was deep, very deep, in the sulks. He was so deep in them that he couldn’t see jolly round Mr. Sun smiling down on him. He couldn’t see anything lovely in the beautiful, broad, Green Meadows with the shadows of the clouds chasing one another across them. He couldn’t hear the music of the birds and the bees. He couldn’t even hear the Merry Little Breezes whispering secrets as they danced around him. He couldn’t see and hear because—well, because he wouldn’t see and hear. That is always the way with people who go way down deep in the sulks.
Presently he came to a great big stone. Tommy stopped and scowled at it just as he had been scowling at everybody and everything. He scowled at it as if he thought it had no business to be there. Yet all the time he was glad that it was there. It was just the right size to sit on and try to make himself happy by being perfectly miserable. You know, some people actually find pleasure in thinking how miserable they are. The more miserable they can make themselves feel, the sooner they begin to pity themselves, and when they begin to pity themselves they seem to find what Uncle Jason calls a “melancholy pleasure.”
It was that way with Tommy. Because no one else seemed to pity him, he wanted to pity himself, and to do that right he must first make himself feel the most miserable he possibly could. So he sat down on the big stone, waved his stick for a few moments and then threw it away, put his chin in his two hands and his two elbows on his two knees, and began by scowling down at his bare, brown toes.
“There’s never anything to do around here, and when there is, a fellow can’t do it,” he grumbled. “Other fellows don’t have to weed the garden, and bring in wood, and drive the cows, and when they do it, it isn’t just when they want to have some fun. What’s vacation for, if it isn’t to have a good time in? And how’s a fellow going to do it when he has to work all the time—anyway when he has to work just when he doesn’t want to?” He was trying to be truthful.

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