Little People Read Online Free PDF

daffy enough in midsummer, when you could at least escape outdoors and hide in the shrubbery until they’ve all gone home. In the deep midwinter, of course, there’s nowhere to run to. You have no choice but to turn and face them, like a bear baited by a hundred poodles, and do your best to endure.
    That year, though, my mind was elsewhere most of the time. Instead of cowering in nooks and trying not to scream every time some aunt falsely accused me of having grown, I blundered through the festive season shrouded in a cloaking device of preoccupation that in the event earned me far more privacy and freedom from intrusion than I had any right to expect. Unfortunately I was too wrapped up in my long, strange thoughts to notice, let alone enjoy.
    Stuck in my mind like a haddock-rib in an unwary throat were some of the things the elf had said, just before he died. Something about death being freedom; also about knowing who I was and why I could see him, and something else about it not counting because he was outside the limits, whatever that was supposed to mean. And hadn’t he called me a traitor at some point? I wasn’t sure; after all, I’d been in a state of mild shock at the time and I certainly hadn’t taken notes. But: the point I’m trying to make is that if none of it had made any sense I could’ve ignored it, filed it under ‘miscellaneous’ in the shoebox of memory and moved on. Unfortunately, there were one or two minuscule twinkles of sense winking up at me, like the eyes of Dutch paintings following you round the room.
    Freedom, the poor little bugger had said, and outside the limits, and knowing who I was; and there was a garden out there, somewhere under all the rain, in which nobody ever worked but which nevertheless boasted a flower every 3.75 inches and lawn edges you could do trigonometry by. A garden where I’d seen an elf and then been firmly told not to.
    Maybe there’re people in this life who can bring themselves to ignore world-altering facts and events when they tread in them or trip over them. Maybe back in the twelfth century a man sat under an apple tree, looking up at the branches and rubbing the top of his head resentfully, and suddenly out of a clear blue sky the truth about gravity swooped down on him and gate-crashed his mind. But he looked the other way and hummed a tune loudly to drown out the voice in his head, knowing that it’d be far better for all concerned if he didn’t get involved. After all, discovering and inventing isn’t compulsory. You have the choice to look the other way when the coastline of the undiscovered country suddenly looms at you out of the mist; when you spill your bathwater, you can turn a blind eye to the physics and just mop the floor with a towel until all the evidence has gone.
    Could you, really? It’d depend on the circumstances, such as whether the Inquisition was likely to drag you out of your kip at three in the morning and set fire to you, or whether there was good money to be made. But nobody was going to barbecue me for discovering elves, and nobody was going to pay me for it either, because there wasn’t a lawyer’s chance in Hell that anybody, with one possible but largely irrelevant exception, would ever take me seriously. So it stood to reason that if elves couldn’t be true, neither could the disturbing little theory that was starting to coagulate in the back of my mind, since there was nothing for it to be true with .
    So there I was on Christmas Day: Columbus with his hands folded behind his back, whistling perhaps a tad too nonchalantly and saying, ‘New World? Nah, sorry didn’t see anything like that, squire.’ No wonder even my cousin Eileen and my cousin Derek left me alone and went and hassled someone else. By mid-afternoon, in fact, I’d reached the point where the effort of not reaching the only logical conclusion of my discoveries was starting to give