The Fallen Star
A children's story, not available in print. Introductory excerpt
follows:
The Introduction
Once upon a time, oh my darlings, my little ones, there lived nineteen
cousins in one great house. There were big cousins and little cousins and
teeny tiny baby cousins. There were smart cousins and strong cousins,
solemn cousins and merry cousins -- why, in that house there was every
kind of cousin you could think of -- and if there weren't quite yet, well,
you just had to wait for the babies to grow up, and they'd be sure to be
just the kind of cousins you were looking for....
The House
They all lived together in a great big house. It was so big, that you
might as well call it a castle, though it wasn't made of stone. It was
made of strong red bricks, and it had nine stories. Each story had nine
windows, and there were nine steps leading up to the next story. On the
first story were the nine bedrooms (so that in the case of an emergency,
they could get the babies out quickly), and each bedroom had its own
window looking out into the wide wide world. On the second story, there
was a kitchen, with a great big dining table with nine sides (a nonagonal
table, as they say), and many many chairs, some soft, some hard, and all
of them just right for the person sitting in them. On the third story,
there were nine bathrooms -- some of the cousins thought it would have
made life easier if there were a bathroom on every floor, but the house
was built the way it was built, and there wasn't a thing they could do
about it now. They were nice bathrooms, though -- each one a different
shade of greeny-blue, with mermaid mosaics on the bottoms of the tubs, and
fluffy white clouds painted on the ceilings....
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