“This is the library” Mrs. Cabin said as she introduced the place to his grandchild Dan and his two friends Doug and Robert.
The library was enormous, mazelike, and appeared to never end. The shelves reached up to twenty feet in height, with there being wonderful looking chandeliers that hung from the ceiling like glittering diamonds. The ground between the shelves had beautiful red carpets like the ones you see at a royal wedding.
Dan and his friends oohed and ahhed. They were book addicts, so they loved reading. And seeing this huge library filled to the brim with books excited them.
“Woah, this is so cool and so big!” said Dan. “How far does this library go?”
“Go see for it yourself” Mrs. Cabin said, grinning at the curious boys. “But don’t go too far, or you’ll get lost.”
“Lost?” questioned Robert. “Yes,” replied Mrs. Cabin. “But if you do get lost, which I hope you don’t, there is a way out. The key is to follow the narrow path”
The boys nodded, but they feared that they might get lost. However, their curiosity won over them, and they quickly ran down the stairs and entered the maze of the library.
Mrs. Cabin grinned again as she watched the boys disappearing into the library. “They’ll learn, they’ll learn” she thought in her head.
As the boys explored shelf by shelf, they realized that all of the shelves were filled with children’s books. Dan took out “Oh the places you’ll go” by Doctor Seuss and looked at it. He used to like Dr. Seuss novels when he was little, but now they were too easy for him. “Why are there only easy books? We want novels” he said.
“Maybe if we go deeper into the library there will be more challenging books to read,” Robert suggested.
“But remember what my grandmother said?” said Dan. “She said to not go too deep or we’ll get lost,”
“Hmm you have a point. How about we use pieces of paper to mark our trail? Kind of like how Hansel and Gretel did with the bread crumbs” said Robert.
“Oh that’s a good idea” Dan replied. “Lucky for us, I have a journal in my pocket. We can rip out a page and use strips of paper to mark our trail.”
“All right, let’s do that then” Doug said.
And so the boys delved deeper into the library while also marking their location with their pieces of paper.
And indeed, Robert was right, because as they progressed through the library, the books in the shelves started getting thicker and thicker. Eventually Dan stopped to take The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain off from a shelf.
“Now this is more like it” he said as he flipped through the pages. “We can stop here and take a reading break”
And so the boys sat down and started reading. Doug read “Black Beauty” by Anna Sewell while Robert read “The Man with the Red Bag” by Eve Bunting.
After about an hour or so, the boys stopped reading in order to go deeper into the library. “I wonder what kind of books we’ll see once we leave this part of the library,” wondered Doug.
“I do wonder that,” said Robert. “Well, we’ll have to see.”
And so the boys ventured on as they got farther and farther away from the library entrance.
To be continued….
