"Charles De Lint - The Little Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

Underneath the reality in which we live and

have our being, another and altogether

different reality lies concealed.



?тАФFRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The Quarrelsome Piper
{Page17}Like burrs old names get stuck to each other and to anyone who walks among them.



?тАФPAUL HAZEL, fromUndersea



There weretwo things Janey Little loved best in the world: music and books, and not necessarily in that
order.

Her favorite musician was the late Billy Pigg, the Northumbrian piper from the northeast of England
whose playing had inspired her to take up the small pipes herself as her principal instrument.

Her favorite author was William Dunthorn, and not just because he and her grandfather had been mates,
though she did treasure the old sepia-toned photograph of the pair of them that she kept sealed in a
plastic folder in her fiddle case. It had been taken just before the Second World War in their native
Mousehole?тАФconfusingly pronounced тАЬMouzelтАЭ by the locals?тАФtwo gangly Cornish lads standing in
front of The Ship Inn, cloth caps in hand, shy grins on their faces.

Dunthorn had written three book-length works of fiction, but until that day in the GafferтАЩs attic when
Janey was having a dusty time of it, ferreting through the contents of old boxes and chests, she knew of
only two. The third was a secret book, published in an edition of just one copy.

The Hidden Peoplewas his best-known work, remembered by most readers with the same fondness
that they recalled forWinnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, and other classics of their childhood.
It told of a hidden race of mouse-sized people known as the Smalls, reduced to their diminutive stature in
the Middle Ages by a cranky old witch who died before her curse could be removed. Supposedly the
Smalls prospered through the ages, living a hidden life alongside that of more normal-sized people right
up to the present day. The book was still in print, in numerous illustrated editions, but JaneyтАЩs favorite
was still the one that contained Ernest ShepardтАЩs delightful pen and ink drawings.

The other novel wasThe Lost Music, published two years after the first. While it didnтАЩt have nearly the
success ofThe Hidden People? тАФdue no doubt to its being less whimsical and the fact that it{Page
18}dealt with more adult themes?тАФits theories of music being a key to hidden realms and secret states
of mind had still made it a classic in the fantasy field. It too remained in print, though there were few