Edward Brabourne - Uncle Joe's Stories

I had almost made up my mind to write no more Fairy Tales, to let sprites and elves alone for ever, and to refrain from any further research into the dark and mysterious doings of warlocks and witches in the olden time. But fate is stronger than the will of man, and I am powerless to resist the influences brought to induce – nay, to compel – me to alter my determination. It is not only that verbal and written requests have come to me from many quarters which it is difficult to resist; it is not only that I am tired of being asked when my new book is coming out, and of being generally disbelieved when I answer "never." There is a stronger influence still. Fairies and elves have an extraordinary power which they exercise over those who have once sought to pry into their mysteries. If once you have dealings with such creatures, you can rarely, if ever, leave them. There is a fatality which urges you on – an irresistible fascination in the subject which brings you back to it again and again, and obliges you to recur to it in spite of yourself. When I walk out in the woods, or ramble through the fields alone, the objects which appear ordinary and commonplace to people who have, unhappily for themselves, neglected to study Fairy Lore, bear to me quite a different appearance. I see traces of the little beings which are not visible to the careless, still less to the unbelieving eye. I hear voices which are inaudible to the ear of the incredulous; and even without this, Fancy – free, glorious Fancy – clothes the grass, the flowers, the bushes, the trees, with a beauty of her own, and peoples every fairy haunt with a spirit company. Is it only Fancy? Ah! that is just what nobody knows. Only how could I tell so many different stories if nobody told them to me first?

That is a question I should like people to put to themselves calmly and quietly, and if they think, after full consideration, that some person or persons must have told me these curious stories, I hope they will come to the conclusion that I am only doing what is right and fair in passing them on to other people, so that the world may know as much as I do about the strange and wonderful beings to whom these stories relate.

I do not think that I ever met so extraordinary a man as Uncle Joe in all my life. We children were all very fond of him, because he had an inexhaustible supply of stories, and those, too, of a kind which are especially popular with children. He had exciting stories of almost every sort: of thrilling adventures by land and sea, of captures by pirates, hair-breadth escapes from Red Indians; fearful conflicts with robbers; terrible struggles with wild animals; and strange encounters with sea-serpents or similarly wonderful creatures. Then he knew an immense deal about giants and dwarfs, witches and wizards, ogres and vampires, and he also possessed no little insight into all that concerned fairies and fairy-land. He could tell of the little sea fairy that rode on the crest of the wave, basking pleasantly when the sun shone down on a calm still ocean, and shrieking madly with frenzied delight when the winds lashed the waves into fury, and carried her forward on the great flakes of snow-like foam; of the fairy who looked after some particular house or family, and always appeared to warn them of danger just at the right moment, or to disclose a buried treasure, exactly in time to save them from ruin; and of the happy little woodland fairies, who are to be found in the deep glades and dark ravines of the wild forest, and about whom such innumerable legends have from time to time been written by some of those fortunate mortals who have visited and been aided by them in time of sickness or danger, and who have in gratitude chronicled their power.

Nothing delighted Uncle Joe so much as to tell one of his charming stories to us, eager listeners as we always were. He liked to get one child on each knee, and to have the others clustering round as near as possible, and then he would start off and go on just for all the world as if he was only reading from a book.

Looking back now, with the calmer judgment of riper years, I hardly know which was most wonderful, the unlimited power of invention of Uncle Joe, or the boundless credulity of us children. Because no man could by any possibility have gone through half the wonderful adventures of which he pretended to have been the hero, if he had lived to twice the ordinary age of man, and kept on searching for adventures all the time. Besides, it would have been five hundred to one against his escaping every time, as Uncle Joe always did, "by the skin o' his teeth."

Once he was tied to the stake, and just going to be scalped by the Indians, when some miraculous thing (I forget what at this moment) occurred to save him; once he was in the very coils of an enormous snake, and was yet preserved; and at another time, he was actually swallowed by a crocodile, (I am sure I don't know how he got down its throat without a disabling nip from some of those teeth which I have noticed in the mouths of stuffed crocodiles in museums,) and escaped by means of employing his penknife in a manner too disagreeable to describe. In short, there never was a man who, according to his own account, had gone through such a series of remarkable adventures as Uncle Joe, and I am therefore quite justified in pronouncing him to have been a most extraordinary man.

I have never discovered what really was Uncle Joe's profession or occupation. For anything I know, he may have been a soldier, a sailor, or a horse-marine; though, for the matter of that, I have so little conception of what may be the duties of persons engaged in the latter profession, that I should dispute the claims of nobody who averred that he had belonged to it. All I know is, that he wore a blue coat with brass buttons, had a hooked nose and a bright eye, and only possessed one arm; the other I solemnly declare I have heard him state, on different occasions, to have been shot off in battle, lost in saving life from a shipwreck, when it got jammed between two planks of the sinking ship, and bitten off by a tiger, under circumstances the details of which I do not happen to remember – it was gone, however, anyhow, was that left-arm of Uncle Joe's, and its loss must have had this great consolation, that it furnished a foundation upon which he built many a romance, pleasing to himself, and interesting to his listeners.

He had been a mighty traveller, had Uncle Joe. From Canada to the farthest extremity of South America, from Constantinople to Hong-Kong, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Cape, all was familiar to him; whilst, as to continental Europe, there seemed to be no hole or corner which he had not explored. England was like his own house to him; that is to say, he knew every county and town in one as well as he knew every room in the other. In fact, to hear him talk on these subjects, you never would for a moment have guessed that which was the real truth, namely, that he had never been further from England than Paris, and had been so particularly ill in crossing the channel that nothing but the fear of the laughter of his friends, coupled with his total and entire ignorance of the French language, prevented his settling in France for the rest of his life, sooner than again undergo the ordeal of that terrible passage.

Happily for us children, (for this occurred before we were at the age of story-hearing, or indeed at any age at all,) he did face the channel once more, and never sought to tempt it again. But all this I only learned many years after, and during the whole of the early portion of my life, I (in common, I am sure, with the great majority of his acquaintance) set Uncle Joe down as a man who had seen more of the world than most living men, and knew more of the geography of foreign lands, as well as of the customs and manners of their inhabitants, than anyone whom I ordinarily met.