The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb Read Online Free PDF

from my being. My hands, my knees, began to quake, and I would have turned around and run back outside, had Colonel Wood not been immediately behind me, barring any escape.
    For slowly rising from a bed—no, two beds, pushed together end to end—was a giantess. An actual giantess, such as I had read about in many a fairy tale, the kind of creature that ate little children who got into mischief or otherwise misbehaved.
    The giantess continued to unwind herself, rising slowly—oh, so slowly!—until she had reached her full height, which seemed, from my perspective, to be twenty feet, at the very least! She had to stoop so that her head did not brush the sloping stateroom ceiling.
    “Hello, Miss Lavini-o,” she said in a basso profundo voice. With a smile, she extended her hand; a hand so massive, so bony, that I fought with every fiber of my being not to recoil from it. As it came near me—again, so excruciatingly slowly—I glanced quickly at the giantess’s feet; they were the size of canoes, and I could easily imagine them squishing me into oblivion. I remembered Mama’s silly terrors about horses’ hooves; how quaint a fear that seemed now!
    “M-m-my name is Lavinia,” I corrected the giantess as I placed my hand, my tiny, delicate hand, in her enormous one. I winced in anticipation, but to my relief she did not crush me. In fact, she seemed to be as hesitant to touch me as I was to touch her; her hand did not even close completely about mine, and she withdrew it with as much haste as she could muster.
    I must confess, right here and now, to making a dreadful assumption. And that assumption was that a person this tall, who moved this slowly, must be very slow of mind and wit as well. All my life, I must admit, I have always associated quickness of mind with smaller people, quicker people, people like me. Large, clumsy creatures, freaks of nature to me—my initial assumption was always that they possessed inferior minds.
    So I corrected the giantess, thinking she was not very bright, forgetting that I myself had mispronounced my own name in my initial consternation.
    “And my name is Sylvia. Miss Sylvia Hardy, from Maine.”
    “For the love of Pete, just look at the two of you!”
    I spun around, startled to find Colonel Wood still standing behind me; I had forgotten all about him. He stood gaping at the tableau before him, his head swiveling up and down as he took the pair of us in; there was an eager gleam in his eye as he appraised the situation.
    “Oh, this is going to be rich! The two of you side by side—byGod, I’m a genius! Barnum who, I ask you? Eh? Colonel John Wood will be the name on everybody’s lips, I wager!”
    I was too speechless to respond. The giantess, however, was not; she dismissed him with a firmness I could not help but admire as she said, “Goodbye, Colonel Wood. Leave us to get better acquainted, for I imagine Lavinia is tired from her journey.”
    And despite the rumbling low pitch of her voice—it tickled my eardrums—and the slowness of her speech, I turned to her with gratitude, blinking back sudden tears. I
was
weary; the journey
was
exhausting. The excitement of my very first train trip had long since abandoned me. The exhilarating sense of discovery I had felt as I stared out soot-covered windows while unfamiliar scenery passed so swiftly by; the novelty of eating sandwiches wrapped in paper, bought from enterprising farm boys at various stops; the thrill of rattling over high bridges while far below, unfamiliar rivers ran—all was gone now.
    I remembered only the dirt, the barnyard odors of being in such close company with strangers who did not wash regularly, the stiffness of my back from sitting up for so long even in sleep, the impossibility of making myself feel fresh with the dirty water in the lavatory basin. That is, even if I could
reach
the basin; I couldn’t, unless I dragged my stair steps with me, but there usually wasn’t enough room in those miserable