WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
"Quite wild animals" cover

"Quite wild animals"

Chapter 4: BAWGUM
Open in WeRead

About This Book

The book is a collection of short, humorous sketches and verses that introduce a menagerie of fanciful, anthropomorphic creatures, each portrait focusing on a single eccentric trait or predicament - loneliness, laziness, vanity, clumsiness, or timidity. Light, playful narration and occasional rhymes describe how each creature lives, eats, dresses, socializes, and copes with obstacles, often ending with a gentle ironic twist. The pieces mix comic description, imagined habits, and tiny moral suggestions without heavy lessons, creating an imaginative, episodic structure that invites children to laugh at character foibles and delight in inventive, visual detail.

BAWGUM


BAWGUM

This is Bawgum. In spite of his fierce expression, he is perfectly safe and has the softest possible heart, but he likes to be thought terrifying and dangerous. Unfortunately nobody really believes he is after they have seen his tail which is most playful and undignified. However, it hurts his feelings to be told that he has a playful tail, so people generally pretend they don’t notice it.

Bawgum talks a good deal because he thinks he has rather a fine voice, and the words he uses are so long that his friends always bring dictionaries when they come to tea with him. Some one said that he started a word one Sunday and was still saying it when they came to see him next Sunday, but I think this must be a joke.

He is rather fat and the doctor has recently told him that he ought to eat nothing but tadpoles for at least three months, but after Bawgum had been eating tadpoles for three days there were no more left in the country, so now he has gone back to his usual diet. I believe the doctor has told him to try skipping every morning after breakfast (for he is really anxious to get thin, he thinks it would make him look more dignified). I am afraid he will find it rather difficult to skip, but he is going to try it for he has asked two friends to come and turn the skipping rope for him.