THE WINDOW TULIP

Since this story is set in Holland, it is appropriate that little Willem's claim to fame was a giant tulip rather than a beanstalk. Willem found an old flower pot with a bulb apparently at the foot of a rainbow, and received special permission from his strict landlord to grow one flower. At the crack of dawn one day, Willem woke up to find the tulip in full bloom, and murmured, as he drifted back to sleep, ""Window tulip full of light, /Grow up taller in the night!"" With such encouragement the tulip grows to an extraordinary height and, just as Willem expects to be evicted the landlord for harboring an outsize plant, the richest tulip grower in Holland makes an offer to buy the tulip for enough money to get Willem's Grandfather a pair of glasses and a little house on the edge of a tulip field. Both the story and illustrations are maladroit and insubstantial.