Maggy Finching was dead, and my friend Vincent Muntle mourned her with all of his heart. But there was some compensation in the return of his long-lost brother to his side. Hannah Pupker found no consolation in the loss of her father and mother and younger sister, for she had always hoped in that small place within her heart where the most improbable things are wished for, that their own hearts should some day be softened, that they should become more Dinglian in their feelings for her and in their feelings for others. I would hold Hannah in my arms for many of the ensuing days and I would comfort her, and over time we would come to love each other and to mend our souls in romantic affection. My family became her family as our union was officiated by the Vicar Upwitch (Uriah Graham and Antonia Bocker tossing the petals).
Though his medical credentials were no longer valid in the Outland, my friend Timberry and his fiancée (and subsequent wife) Susan Fagin assisted in the care and treatment of all of the Dinglian consumptives, and nearly all were healed, including each of the Scadger children so afflicted. The Scadgers and the Trimmers grew close over those tented months and learnt from one another, and indeed there was so much that was to be learned about the Outland that a special school was set up, The Chowser Institute for Outland Studies, wherein Dinglians were versed in the culture and practicalities of Outland living. Dr. Chivery joined the school’s faculty and made substantial contributions when he was lucid. He was delighted to learn that his hypothesis with regard to the impossibility of squaring the circle was proven correct, and that pi was a transcendental number just as he had always believed (and that a supercomputer had truncated it at over one trillion digits!)
Alice came to be restored to her mother and father (and brother and uncle) on that second day. She came by special escort, accompanied by a jeweller by the name of Phillips and by the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania — by the two men who had not only saved her life, but also the lives of eight-thousand denizens of Dingley Dell through their swift, courageous actions. For though it had been Outlanders who had marked us all for extinction, it was also Outlanders who had pulled us back from the brink.
Charlotte wept with joy to have her family intact once more, and Gus, who scarcely ever cried himself, could not turn off his own spigot for worlds.
Phillips told us much that we did not know about his friend Ruth Wolf, and her brave spirit communed with us ever thereafter.
I cannot say much more about us on this day, a year and a half after the destruction of Dingley Dell, for so much has yet to be decided. We continue to reside at the FiG and are grateful to be so well cared for there, but it is not a life that we would permanently wish for ourselves, and we are eager to return to some form of normalcy. We know that to achieve normalcy here in what was once known as the Terra Incognita will require a long period of adjustment — a period about which I may well write some day.
Suffice it to say that there is nothing to be learnt here of any great inculcatory benefit. We are no object lesson for future study. We are simply a little people from an orographically anomalous valley where the words of Charles Dickens sprang from the page and directed our steps and our hearts. We are of no particular importance otherwise, except that we have been uprooted and now as refugees must make our way in a strange and foreign land, and such a journey may fascinate some. There are African pygmies who are being similarly watched in the state of Utah.
There is bad in what was done to us and good in how we came to be rescued, and pride in how much of our deliverance was effected through our own industry. This is a familiar story at its core — a story of human survival, a story that gives evidence of the potential for both good and evil in the species. We are not so very different from you, kind reader. Embrace your child. Bake a loaf of bread and lather it with butter. Go and wash your dog.
I’m certain that he needs it.
— THE END—