The Bashful Frog

By José Leon Machado

This collection of fairytales contains six stories: The Bashful Frog, which is the title of the collection; The Rooster That Wanted to See the World; The Witch and the Cauldron; The Onion Seller; The Ugly Princess; and The Prince of the Strange Kingdom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ed. Vercial
• Release date: May 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547530656

Book preview

The Bashful Frog

– and other tales

Children’s stories

José Leon Machado

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Illustrations by Susana Lima

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English translation by Lesley Sogl

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Ed. Vercial

For Helena Sofia

The best in the world are the kids.

Fernando Pessoa

The Bashful Frog

Once upon a time there was a frog who lived a happy, carefree life in his swamp. He had his very own water lily on which he sunbathed and ate flies that happened to fly overhead. Once in a while, he would share his water lily with a lady frog. He would croak to her all afternoon and offer her his juiciest flies. The lady frog would show her delight by thanking him with a blink of her eyes and a slow, seductive croak. It was a beautiful life.

But one day the peace came to an end.

A young girl called Clarinda lived near the water lily. Her stepmother made her life miserable. When her father, who was a coal miner, went out to the hills to make charcoal, the stepmother forced her to work hard. She made her cook, clean the house, feed the animals and tend to the vegetable garden. She would spend her day working while her stepmother sat in front of the fireplace darning socks.

The worst was not the work, since as we all know, work has never killed anyone. It was rather the way the stepmother treated her. She would spend all day calling out to Clarinda to fetch this and that and she was always saying the girl was sloppy and lazy and good for nothing. Sometimes she would even hit her with a flyswatter that she kept by her feet.

Clarinda was discontent and her father, seeing her unhappiness, asked her what was wrong. But, being a good girl, she did not want to cause any trouble and would lower her head and remain silent as she set the table for supper.

What you need to find is a prince, her father told her. He would get us out of this wretched way of life and you would become a princess. And who knows, maybe you could even become a queen.

The stepmother would laugh and say Her, a queen? She'll become as much of a queen as I'll become an empress!

And she laughed in such a way that Clarinda would not have been surprised if she turned into a witch and flew out the window on a broomstick.  But this never happened and Clarinda came to realize that if she didn't do something about her life, it would only get worse. It was then that she began dreaming of a prince on a white horse, lost in the forest, knocking on her door for help. He would see her, fall madly in love and whisk her off to his palace.

She waited so long that she began to think the forest where she lived was too far from any palace that had a prince who could lose himself in there.

She remembered, however, the stories her mother had told her about princes who were turned into frogs by evil witches. Who knows? Maybe one of the frogs that lived in the swamp was actually a prince?

One afternoon, after washing the lunch dishes, she told her stepmother she was going to water the vegetable garden. She picked up the earthen pitcher and went to the swamp where she usually went to collect water. As she approached it, she saw our frog squatting atop the water lily. He was about to catch a fly but the girl’s presence shifted the air and frightened off the