The House of Wooden Dolls

Once, a prince named Reginald was travelling through a forest when, feeling thirsty, he stopped at an old but brightly painted cottage and, knocking on the door of the cottage, he asked the young woman who lived there if he could draw some water from her well.

“I am prepared to pay for it if you wish”, he said, not wanting to inconvenience the woman in any way.

But the woman seemed more than happy to help him.
“Please come in”, she said, smiling, “You need not fetch water. I will do that and you needn’t worry about paying me. Kindness is its own reward, I always say”.

The prince was very moved by the young woman’s generosity and so accepted her offer to come inside her house.

Inside the house, however, the prince was amazed to see hundreds of little painted, wooden dolls arranged on shelves.

“My, what a lot of dolls you have”, exclaimed the prince, “Are you a doll maker?”.

“Oh yes”, said the woman, smiling broadly, “That’s right. I love making dolls and little clothes for them. I think of them all as my little children”.

But there was something rather odd about the dolls, the prince noticed.

For one thing, they were, all of them, men; not one little lady doll among them and, another thing, they all seemed very sad with large frowns carved upon their wooden faces.

“Why do you make your dolls look so unhappy?”, asked the prince, puzzled.

“Unhappy?”, asked the woman, seeming surprised, “Why should they be unhappy? They have everything a little doll could ever want”.

The prince did not want to offend the woman by pursuing the matter and so he forgot about the frowning dolls.

Then the woman went out to fetch some water for the prince from her well and, while she was out, the prince saw a family of little mice poke their heads out of their mouse hole in the corner of the kitchen and then scurry over to his shoe and, strangely, he thought, none of the mice had any tails.

“Please, sir”, squeaked the father of the mouse family, “You look like a kind hearted person and so perhaps you can get our tails back for us. The woman who owns this house, you see, caught I and my family once and cut of our tails and she keeps them in an old silver kettle on top of her kitchen cupboard. It’s so high that we cannot get to it”.

The prince could not believe that the woman who had invited him into her home could be so cruel as to cut off mouse’s tails but then he went to look on top of the kitchen cupboard and, just as the mouse had said, there was an old silver kettle and, inside it, four little mouse tails.

Taking hold of the tails, the prince gave them to the mice and even helped to tie them back on.

Then the father mouse said, “Because you have been so kind to us, it is only right that we warn you about the woman who owns this house.
Although she seems nice, she is really an evil witch who plans to turn you into a doll. All of the dolls in her house were once young men like you but the witch tricked them into drinking a potion that turned them into painted wooden dolls. If you drink even a thimbleful of the water that the witch pours into your cup then you will suffer the same fate”.

But, just then, the prince heard the witch coming back to the house, carrying water from her well and singing, “He shall be handsome and he shall be good and he shall be a little doll made out of wood”.

Thinking quickly, the prince went over to the dolls on one of the witch’s shelves and turned them all round to face the wall. Then, returning to his seat, he waited for the witch to come in carrying the water.

When she came into the kitchen, she poured out two cups; one for the prince and one for herself and, as she was doing so, the prince saw her slipping some strange sort of powder into his cup which he took to be the potion that turned men into dolls.

But, just as he was about to drink from his cup, the prince said to the witch,
“How odd! Look madam, some of your little dolls have turned themselves around as if to hide their eyes, almost as if they did not wish to see something which frightens them”.

“How very odd, indeed”, said the witch, scratching her head, “They’ve never done that before”.

But then, with a wicked chuckle, she said, “Well, I won’t have them misbehaving. They will all sit up and face the front like good little dolls”.
Then, getting up, she started to turn the dolls back the right way round.

As she was doing this, however, the prince switched round their cups so that now the witch had the cup with the evil potion in it.

And, when the witch sat down again and, grinning, drank from her cup, suddenly the prince saw a peculiar look of horror fill her eyes and then, to his amazement, the witch started to shrink and her hands and face started to become hard like varnished wood.

“No!”, screamed the witch, angrily, “I am not supposed to be the doll, you are!”.

But then, in the next moment, the witch had turned completely into a little painted, wooden doll in a pretty dress with curly hair made of silk thread.

“This would make a fine doll for a little girl”, said the prince picking up the doll.

Just then, however, he noticed something very strange about all of the dolls on the shelves round about him. They were all smiling.