1 The wooden doll had no peace. “If only I were a different kind of doll,” she thought. A soft rag doll could tear. A fragile china doll might easily break. Anything in the world would be better than a good, strong wooden doll with a painted head and movable joints. A good, strong wooden doll was a sad thing to be.

 

2 Sometimes the poor doll wished to be a toy train, or a set of building blocks, or a woolly lamb. Being anything else on Earth would be better than being a wooden doll. The wooden doll never had any peace. Children and grown up humans picked it up and put it down at all hours of the day and night. They made it go to bed when the children went to bed, get up when they got up, be bathed when they were bathed, dressed when they were dressed, taken out in all weather, stuffed into their backpacks when they went to school. It was left in lonely corners, dropped on stairs, forgotten, neglected, bumped, banged, broken, and glued together.

 

3 “I might as well just be a human being!” the doll thought, and then it began to think about human beings and what strange creatures they were, always going about, but all on their own. No one even carried humans, except for tiny human babies. Human beings were always sleeping and waking, and eating and drinking, and laughing and crying, and talking and walking, and doing this and that and the other, never resting for long together. Those poor humans could not be still for even a single day.

 

4 “They are always making a noise,” thought the wooden doll. “They are always talking and walking about, always moving things and doing things, building up and tearing down, and making and unmaking forever and forever, and never are they quiet. It is lucky that we are not all human beings, or the world would be worn out in no time, and there would not be a corner left in the world for a poor doll to rest its head.”