Explore "Tommy's Hero" by Thomas Anstey Guthrie on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was the night after Tommy had been taken to his first pantomime, and he had been lying asleep in his little bedroom (for now that he was nine he slept in the night nursery no longer); he had been asleep, when he was suddenly awakened by a brilliant red glare. At first he was afraid the house was on fire, but when the red turned to a dazzling green, he gave a great gasp of delight, for he thought the transformation scene was still going on. 'And there's all the best part still to come,' he said to himself.
But as he became wider awake, he saw that it was out of the question to expect his bedroom to hold all those wonders, and he was almost surprised to see that there was even so much as a single fairy in it. A fairy there was, nevertheless; she stood there with a star in her hair, and her dress shimmering out all around her, just as he had seen her a few hours before, when she rose up, with little jerks, inside a great gilded shell, and spoke some poetry, which he didn't quite catch.