This Christmas I was given an unusual gift by my Brother's partner, Lauren. It was a framed color drawing of odd little people helping children learn how to read. A fitting gift for a librarian! Apparently it had been in Lauren's family for awhile, and she said her Mother told her those little people were Brownies.
I saw that some backing tape was eating at the paper, and could tell the drawing was from out of a book. So I removed the frame and found on the reverse side that the little guys were indeed Brownies, just like Lauren said:
When to the seaside off you go
The Brownies will come too, I know;
They'll take you in the sea, no doubt,
And laugh to see you splash about.
On the color page, note that two Brownies have numbers attached to their hats.
I'd love to know the source book for this. Is this by Palmer Cox? Somehow it looks too primitive to be his work, but I could be wrong. One could argue that the two images are by different illustrators, the line drawing being much less polished.
Hopefully I am giving you comic art scholars out there a nice mystery to solve.
Brownies, along with elves, trolls, and fairies, were part of the mythology I grew up hearing stories about. But we knew it was all make believe. Sasquatch, however, was another matter.
