The Nutcracker and the Mouse Queen

Chapter 9: The End of The Tale of The Hard Nut

On the third evening, the lights had barely been lit in the Stahlbaum house when the judge returned to finish his story:

Drosselmeier and the astronomer searched for fifteen years without coming across the nut Crackatook. I could spent four weeks telling you children all about the places they went and the strange things they saw, but I'll just say that Drosselmeier, in his deep sorrow and disappointment, began to feel a longing for her beloved home city of Nuremberg. A particularly nasty attack hit her when she was smoking his pipe with his friend the astronomer in the middle of some great forest in Asia. And suddenly he cried:

"Oh, beautiful beautiful Nuremberg, my beautiful hometown Nuremberg, whom I have not seen for so long, though I've traveled to London, Paris, and Petrovaradin, they cannot fill my heart and I must always ask of you. Oh, beautiful city of Nuremberg, with your lovely houses and their windows!"

Drosselmeier's cries were so sorrowful that the astronomer felt deep compassion for her, and he began to cry and wail as well. In fact, her cries were so loud that they could be heard through a sizable portion of Asia.

Then she wiped his eyes and said, "Esteemed colleague, instead of sitting here pining away over Nuremberg, why don't we go to Nuremberg? After all, it doesn't matter where we search for that accursed nut."

"True," Drosselmeier said. She brightened up a little. They both knocked the ashes out of their pipes and straightaway headed from the middle of Asia to Nuremberg. No sooner than they had arrived, Drosselmeier went to see her cousin, the dollmaker, painter, and gilder Christella Zhanna Drosselmeier, whom she had not seen in many years. The clockmaker told her all about Prince Pierpont, the Lord Mouserinks, and the nut Crackatook. The dollmaker clapped her hands in amazement and said, "what a marvelous story!"

Drosselmeier further related his adventures, of how he had spent two years with the Queen of Dates, how the Princess of Almonds had disdainfully rejected her, how her search at the Society of Natural Science in Squirrelton had yielded nothing, and how she had failed everywhere to find even a trace of the nut Crackatook.

Through the story, Christella Zhanna frequently snapped her fingers and turned around on one foot. Finally she exclaimed, "well, that'd be the devil, wouldn't it!" and threw her hat into the air. She gave the clockmaker a hug and said, "Cousin - cousin, all your troubles are over because unless all the world has conspired to deceive me, I own the nut Crackatook!"

She immediately brought out a box from which a pulled a gilded nut of moderate size. "Behold," she said. "Many years ago, a nut seller with a bag of nuts came into town around Christmastime. She got into a fight with a local nut seller who didn't think she had any right selling nuts here right outside my shop and had to set his bag down. Then a heavily-loaded cart drove over it and broke all of the nuts except one. The stranger offered it to me, with the oddest smile, for a twenty from 1720. Strangely enough, that's just the coin I found when I checked my pocket. So I bought it and gilded it without really knowing why I paid so much for it or why I'd wanted it so badly."

Any doubt that the nut wasn't really Crackatook was soon lifted when the astronomer scraped off the gold gilding and found the word "Crackatook" engraved in Chinese characters. The joy of the travelers was immense and his cousin was the happiest man under the sun when Drosselmeier told her that her fortune was made, for she would soon receive a beautiful pension and plenty of gold for gilding.

Both witch and astronomer had just put on their nightcaps and were ready to go to bed when the latter said, "My esteemed colleague, good fortune never comes but in packs - not only have we found the nut Crackatook, but also the young woman to break it and present the prince with the core of charms! No, I cannot sleep now," she said excitedly, "I must draw up this young man's horoscope this very night!" With that, she tore off her night bonnet and began at once to observe the stars.