Abominables

Abominables — page 9
Ambrose who was always being sat on by the others or falling into mouse-hare holes or getting lost The first thing Agatha did naturally was teach all the yetis to talk Father learned to speak quite quickly even though he was over three hundred years old by the time Agatha came to the valley and it is not so easy to learn things as you get older And of course the children learned as easily as they breathed After that Agatha taught them all the things that her governess had taught her like the importance of good manners not burping after meals not scratching under the armpits however much one itched and never closing one’s ear lids when being spoken to She taught them how to clean between their teeth with a sharpened stick and how to wash their eight toed backward-pointing feet in the stream after they’d been running because smelly feet are not polite She taught them sums and their alphabet and how to sing hymns Best of all she used to tell them stories Soon after she arrived in the valley Father had realized that a well-bred English girl needed somewhere to call home and he had gathered stones and built her a little house no more than a hut really roofing it with branches and grass In the evenings Agatha would sit outside with the yetis around her Once upon a time she would begin The yetis were mad about stories Puss in Boots Jack and the Beanstalk The Three Bears all day they followed her about begging for more As for Ambrose long before dawn Agatha could hear him sitting and breathing outside the entrance to her hut by the time he was two years old he was much too big to get through it waiting and waiting to hear about Ali Baba or poor Cinderella or Dick Whittington’s cat