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admired and she began to get commissions, even from the Lord of the Manor, to make up cloth as fine as spiders’ webs to adorn full-sized human beings. Everyone in the village loved Thumbling. He was enchanting, magical, charming. He grew nimble in brain and body, full of tricks and funny little ways. The villagers were proud of him and felt he was a credit to them. They came to visit his mother to see him, and filled her house with chatter and laughter. She had no time to be bored and no need to nag her man for conversation any more; and it is easier to talk about your feelings when you are overflowing with joyful pride than when you know that you do not make your beloved happy and feel guilty about it. The couple were too contented and too loving to exploit Thumbling. His father resisted all pleas to bring him to the inn to dance and caper for drunks; his mother quietly declined invitations to show her women friends what he looked like naked. And they loved him too much even to feel tempted by the generous cash offers that passing salesmen made them – to take him away and show him in the big cities.
    They adored their son both despite and because of his oddity, and all the more as it became clear that she was not going to conceive again even though there was now both more frequency and more pleasure for them both in doing those things which should lead to the making of babies. They spoiled him of course, but it was hard to see why that might matter in the long run.
    As Thumbling got older his mother got ever happier. As her friends’ and neighbours’ boys grew, they grew away from their mothers. They went off on their own to explore, or they went off with their fathers to work, or they got in fights and annoyed the neighbours – but Thumbling was always too small to do any of this. He stayed with his mother. When he wanted to go off into the forest to play his own games and have his own adventures, she could throw a fine net over her potato patch and it was a forest for him. He could explore all day and build himself nests and dens and climb high, high into his potato trees and fight with fierce beetles, but her net held him safe and he could not get away.
    As her friends’ and neighbours’ boys grew, they made friends of their own and encouraged each other in obstinacy and sullenness and dumb insolence. They had secrets. Their very glances hurt their mothers’ feelings. They had gangs and girls they thought more beautiful than their mothers and things to do they did not wish to talk about. But Thumbling did not have friends like that; he would never leave her for a pretty little sweetheart, or a heartless trollop unworthy of his blithe beauty and his quick wit. She was lucky; her son would always be at home as coddled as a baby and as safe as an old man. He would always love his mother best. He would always sit on the rim of her mixing bowl and chat as she stirred in the raisins for the pudding; he would always and forever curl up in peace in the hollow of her clavicle, warm against her neck, drowsy with the rhythm of her spindle. And her man would always come home from field or wood, weary from a long day’s work, but light in the pleasure of his home, and they would all three sit at, or on, the table and talk together and laugh because Thumbling was so funny and sweet and innocent and he was theirs for ever.
    Then one night she woke suddenly and from the warmth of her man’s arms she could hear her son weeping. And she knew at once that he was weeping for the friends he would never have, for the work he would never do, for the woman he would never kiss and for the child he would never father. He was weeping for the great dark forest through which he would never walk; for the long slope of the road between the great green trees that he would never come down to the new places where his fortune might be waiting. He was weeping for his freedom.
    Love and happiness had made her courageous, with a far nobler bravery