Rating: Not rated
Tags: Juvenile, Fiction
Summary
“She saw: first, a square opening,
about eight inches wide, in the lowest step…finally she
saw that there was a walnut shell, or half one, outside the
nearest door…she went to look at the shell—but
looked with the greatest astonishment. There was a baby in
it.”
So ten-year-old Maria, orphaned mistress of Malplaquet,
discovers the secret of her deteriorating estate: on a deserted
island at its far corner, in the temple long ago nicknamed
Mistress Masham’s Repose, live an entire community of
people—”The People,” as they call
themselves—all only inches tall. With the help of her
only friend—the absurdly erudite Professor—Maria
soon learns that this settlement is no less than the kingdom of
Lilliput (first seen in
Gulliver’s Travels) in exile. Safely hidden for
centuries, the Lilliputians are at first endangered by
Maria’s well-meaning but clumsy attempts to make their
lives...