The children grew up without knowing any Numbers, and they forgot the magic they had learnt in the forest.
It was then that the little blue fairy came to the Jungle of Mathsss. Her name was Ari-the-Metic, meaning the little blue fairy. She was just a tiny little thing if you compared her to the giants, but she was very very disciplined. She had all sorts of tools with her in a basket strapped to her back, tools with which she would help clean up all kinds of messes and build all kinds of nice things. There were plusses, minuses, intoos, dividers and equaltoos in the basket. Ari-the-Metic used these to clear up small bits of the jungle of Mathssss, as she loved the jungle. She hummed quietly to herself as she flitted here and there, and she only drank nectar from the flowers.
Ari-the-Metic was invisible to the giants because of her magic. She flew from one place to another on her blue wings and worked very hard from morning to night. But the jungle was huge and everyday the giants were doing more and more damage to it. The little blue fairy could not do enough to clean it up. She was sad to see so many Numbers being gobbled up each day and she longed to help them somehow. So she decided to find a way for helping them with her magic.
Now, there was an amazing thing in the jungle of Mathsss. Tucked away in a deep corner of the jungle, there was a small broken down hut covered with all kinds of flowers and creepers. Nine little Numbers lived in it. They were One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight And Nine. All belonged to the same family. They were the only family in the forest with all nine Numbers in it. Nine was the eldest and One was the youngest.
Before the giants came to the jungle, they had been a happy lot, singing merrily, sharing the housework, playing with each other and with any other Numbers who happened to come by. But now things were different. They had nowhere to go. They couldn’t go out for fear of the giants. At night they heard the giants crashing about the woods. In the day they heard the spooky silence of the jungle and sometimes the gibbering of Al Gebra. They were scared as scared can be. They had only one good thing in their lives, and that was a small patch of sunlight outside the hut every afternoon.
So these nine Numbers spent their time quarreling in whispers. You see, they were bored, having nothing to do, nowhere to go and no one to tell them anything. How long can anyone go on sitting quietly in a small broken down hut? So they quarreled with each other bitterly. The bigger Numbers would tease and hit the smaller ones. The smaller one would pinch and squeak and sulk. In all this the worst hit was the littlest one, that is, One. All the rest were bigger and stronger than him. The Little One, as he was called, had to make everyone happy by doing their work for them. The rest of them would sit around and quarrel. The Little One did not mind making them happy, but he did mind getting beaten and pinched and not having enough to eat. He wished, oh how he wished, to get out of this situation somehow.
Now one special day two things happened which would change the lives of all who lived in the jungle.
Get your own Free Home Page