What appears below is a text written by Edward Gorey in the early fifties which he never got around to illustrating. That was apparently his method—the words first and eventually—perhaps, as in this case, never—he added the drawings. The strange animal above, whatever its identity, is not a hippo. It has been picked from a vast file of over eight thousand drawings, most of them unpublished, because it rather resembles one. Gorey wrote over a hundred scenarios that are, alas, not crosshatched with illustrations. Last year fifteen of them were performed at the off-Broadway Century Theater on East Fifteenth Street. The final sketch from the show is the one that follows …

 

 

One day when she was five Angelica was in the gazebo, playing snap with her brothers.

 

Suddenly she caught sight of something rising from the ha-ha.

 

It was a spectral hippopotamus. “Fly at once!” he said. “All is discovered.”

 

She remembered the bread pudding under the carpet.

 

She ran into the woods, and was not found by the servants until the sun was going down.