The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Number 94. The wonderful Wizard of Oz. If you stood on the great Kansas prairie and spun in a circle, you would see nothing but gray. The sky was not the bright, joyful blue you might see on a summer morning, but a soft, heavy gray that seemed to press down upon the earth. The grass was not green. The fierce sun had burned the tips of the blades until they were the very same color as the soil. The house where little Dorothy lived with her Aunt Em and her Uncle Henry was gray too. Its paint had blistered and peeled under the relentless Kansas wind until the wood underneath looked like the dusty road. Uncle Henry was a farmer, and he never laughed. He worked from the first light of dawn until the stars came out, and his face was set in a hard, quiet line. Aunt Em, when she had first come to this prairie, had been young and bright, but the wind had taken the color from her cheeks and the spark from her eyes. She too had forgotten how to smile. But Dorothy had not forgotten. She had a secret weapon against the gray, and his name was Toto. Toto was a little black dog with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny wee nose. Toto did not work, and Toto did not worry. He played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and she loved him with all her heart. It was Toto who kept Dorothy from turning as gray as her surroundings. This story, which has traveled all over the world and been told in theaters, on screens, and in countless bedtime hours, belongs to the folklore of the United States. It was written down at the very turn of the 20th century by a man named L. Frank Baum, who wanted to make a new kind of fairy tale. One filled with wonder, where the monsters were not too dreadful, and the magic felt as fresh as a spring morning. And though many people today remember a famous movie with shoes of bright red, the story we are telling today is the older one, the original one, where the shoes that walk the yellow brick road are made of pure gleaming silver. On the afternoon our story begins, the air was strangely still. Uncle Henry sat on the doorstep and looked anxiously at the sky, which was even grayer than usual. From the far north, there came a low, deep wailing sound. From the south, another whistling wind answered. "There's a cyclone coming, Em!" Uncle Henry called out, his voice sharp with sudden fear. "I'll go look after the stock." Aunt Em ran to the door and looked at the sky. "Quick, Dorothy!" she screamed. "Run for the cellar!" In the middle of the floor of their tiny cabin was a trap door, leading down into a small, dark hole in the earth where they could hide from the terrible winds. Dorothy snatched Toto up in her arms and started for the trap door, but Toto was frightened by the howling of the wind, which had suddenly grown deafening. He wiggled out of her arms and ran under the bed. Dorothy scrambled after him. "Dorothy, let him go! Get down!" Aunt Em cried, already climbing down the ladder into the dark safety of the cellar. But Dorothy would not leave her dog. She crawled under the bed, caught Toto by his collar, and started back toward the trap door. She never made it. With a sound like the roar of a thousand steam engines, the cyclone hit the house. It did not tear the roof off or smash the walls to splinters, as cyclones often do. Instead, the wind met exactly at the center of the house, lifted it gently off its foundations and carried it up, up, up into the air, as easily as you might carry a feather on a breezy afternoon. It was very dark, and the wind screamed horribly all around them, but the house itself rose quite smoothly. After the first few terrifying moments, when Dorothy felt…

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