NCERT Book Class 8 English (It So Happened) Chapter 3 The Selfish Giant

3 The Selfish Giant
I

• The Giant’s garden was beautiful, and children loved to play in it.
• The Giant, who was selfish, built a high wall round his lovely garden.
• Children did not enter the garden thereafter. Nor did Spring and
Summer till the Giant experienced a change of heart.

EVERY afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children
used to go and play in the Giant’s garden.
It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and
there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there
were twelve peach-trees that in the springtime broke out into delicate
blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The
birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to
stop their games in order to listen to them. “How happy we are
here!” they cried to each other.
One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend,
the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. When
he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.
“What are you doing here?” he cried in a very gruff voice, and
the children ran away.

Cornish ogre: a giant of Cornwall (in the U.K.) ogre: (in legends and fairy stories) a cruel
giant who eats people; (in common usage) a very frightening person gruff: rough; surly