The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

orothy lived in the middle of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, because the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon for many miles. It had four walls, a floor, and a roof, making one room; and that room held a rusty-looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another. There was no attic at all, and no cellar—except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go if one of those great whirlwinds came, strong enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, with a ladder leading down into the small, dark hole.

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree or a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass wasn’t green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and those were gray too. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand to her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl in wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.