| 2 |
| 2 |
| — |
| 4 |
"How aggravating!" said Jimmieboy.
"Abominable!" ejaculated the Pad.
"I believe it's a key to what has gone before," said the Pencil, shaking his rubber wisely. "Two and two make four—two and two make four. Ah! I know. You've got to put two and two together to make four. If we put those two leaves of nonsensical words together, maybe we'll have a poem. Let's try."
"It'll use me up, I'm afraid," sighed the Pad.
"Oh, no. It won't take more than a half of you," said the Pencil, putting the two leaves on which Jimmieboy had first written together.
"It looks like a poem," he said, when he had fitted the two together. "Let's see how it reads.
"I have not seen them since.
And if my memory's not wrong,
They both were dressed in chintz,
With that the couple walked along;"
"That doesn't mean a blessed thing," said the Pad.
"It's nonsense," said Jimmieboy.
"Just wait!" said the Pencil, beginning to read again:
And straightway change your vest."
For you to go upstairs with me,
Replied, "I think it's best
"If that's the case," the Snickersnee
And catch the early train."
I hadn't time to leave the shop
"My reason for it's plain;
"I know it," said the Polypop;
"Since two weeks yesterday."
You haven't uttered one small cheer
Oh, Polypop, I say,
Then quoth the Snickersnee, "See here,
He didn't pay his fee.
And as the moon was shining bright,
To see the Snickersnee,
The Polypop came down one night
"Ho!" jeered the Pad. "That's elegant poetry, that is. You might get paid five cents a mile for stuff like that, if you wanted to sell it and had luck."
"I don't care," said the Pencil. "It rhymes well."
"Oh, I know what's the matter," said Jimmieboy, gleefully. "Why, of course it's poetry. Read it upside down, and it's all right. It's dream poetry, and dreams always go the other way. Why, it's fine. Just listen:
"The Polypop came down one night
To see the Snickersnee,
And, as the moon was shining bright,
He didn't pay his fee."
"That is good," said the Pad. "Let me say the next:
"Then, quoth the Snickersnee, 'See here,
Oh, Polypop, I say,
You have not uttered one small cheer
Since two weeks yesterday.'"
"I thought it would come out right," said the Pencil. "The next two verses are particularly good, too:
"'I know it,' said the Polypop;
'My reason for it's plain;
I hadn't time to leave the shop
And catch the early train.'
"'If that's the case,' the Snickersnee
Replied, 'I think it's best
For you to go upstairs with me,
And straightway change your vest.'"
"Now altogether," cried the Pad, enthusiastically. "One, two, three!" And then they all recited:
"With that the couple walked along;
They both were dressed in chintz;
And if my memory's not wrong,
I have not seen them since."
"Hooray!" cried Jimmieboy, as they finished—so loudly that it nearly deafened the Pad, which jumped from his lap and scurried back to the table as fast as it could go.
"What's that cheer for?" asked papa, looking down into Jimmieboy's face, and grabbing the Pencil, which was on the point of falling to the floor.
"It's for Dream Poetry," murmured Jimmieboy, getting drowsy again. "I've just dreamed a lot. It's on the Pad."
"Indeed!" said papa, with a sly wink at mamma. "Let's get the Pad and read it."
The little fellow straightened up and ran across to the desk, and, grasping the Pad firmly in his hands, handed it to his father to read.
"H'm!" said papa, staring at the leaf before him. "Blank verse."
"Read it," said Jimmieboy.
"I can't to-night, my boy," he answered. "My eyes are too weak for me to see dream writing."
For between you and me that was the only kind of writing there was on that Pad.
IV.
A SUBTERRANEAN MUTINY.
It seemed rather strange that it should have been left there, and yet Jimmieboy was glad that in grading his papa's tennis-court the men had left that bit of flat rock to show up on the surface of the lawn. It had afforded him no end of pleasure since he had first discovered it. As a make-believe island in a raging sea of grass, he had often used it to be cast away upon, but chiefly had he employed it as a vantage ground from which to watch his father and his father's friends at their games of tennis. The rock was just about large enough for the boy to sit upon and pretend that he was umpire, or, as his father said, mascot for his father's opponents, and it rarely happened that a game of tennis was played upon the court that was not witnessed by Jimmieboy seated upon his rocky coigne.
The strangest experience that Jimmieboy ever had with this bit of stone, however, was one warm afternoon last summer. It was at the drowsy period of the day. The tennis players were indulging in a game, which, to the little onlooker, was unusually dull, and he was on the point of starting off in pursuit of something, it mattered not what, so long as it was interesting enough to keep him awake, when he observed a most peculiar thing about the flat stone. It had unquestionably become transparent! Jimmieboy could see through it, and what he saw was of most unexpected quality.
"Dear me!" he ejaculated, "how very queer. This rock is made of glass."
Then he peered down through it, and saw a beautiful marble staircase running down into the earth, at the foot of which was a great door that looked as though it was made of silver, and the key was of gold. At the sides of the staircase, hanging upon the walls, were pictures of strange little men and women, but unlike the men and women in other pictures, they moved about, and talked, and romped, and seemed to enjoy themselves hugely. Great pictures were they indeed to Jimmieboy's mind, because they were constantly changing, like the designs in his kaleidoscope.
"I must get down there," he said, softly, to himself. "But how?"
As he spoke the door at the foot of the steps opened, and a small creature, for all the world like the goblin in Jimmieboy's fairy book, poked his head out. The goblin looked all about him, and then turning his eyes upward until they met those of the boy, he cried out:
"Hullo! Are you the toy peddler?"
"No," replied Jimmieboy.
"Then you are the milk broker, or the potato merchant, and we don't want any milk or any potatoes."
The goblin slammed the door when he had said this, and with such a bang that all the little people in the pictures ran to the edge of the frame and peered out to see what was the matter. One poor little fellow, who had been tending sheep in a picture half-way up the stairs, leaned out so far that he lost his balance and tumbled out head over heels. The sheep scampered over the hill and disappeared in the background of the painting.
"Poor little shepherd boy!" said Jimmieboy. "I hope you are not hurt!"
The shepherd boy looked up gratefully at the speaker, and said he wasn't, except in his feelings.
"Is there any way for me to get in there?" asked Jimmieboy.
"No, sir," said the shepherd boy. "That is, not all of you. Part of you can come in."
"Ho!" said Jimmieboy. "I can't divide myself up."
"Yes, you can," returned the shepherd boy. "It's easy enough, when you know how, but I suppose you don't know how, not having studied arithmetic. You can't even add, much less divide."
"Maybe you can tell me how," said Jimmieboy.
"Certainly, I can," said the shepherd boy. "The part of you that can come in is your eye, and your ear, and your voice. All the rest of you must stay out."
"But how do I get 'em in?" asked Jimmieboy.
"They are in now," said the other. "You can see me, you can hear me, and I can hear you."
"But I can't see what's beyond that door."
"Oh, we'll fix that," said the little shepherd. "I'll knock on the door, and when it is opened you can tell the goblin that you want to see what he's got, and he'll show it all to you if you tell him that your father is the man who didn't blast the rock out."
The shepherd boy then went softly down the stairs, knocked on the door, and before it was opened had flown back to his duties in the picture. Then, as he had intimated, the goblin opened the door again, and poking his head out as before, cried:
"Is that you, milk broker?"
"No," answered Jimmieboy. "I am the son of the man who didn't blast away the flat rock, and my eye and my ear and my voice want to come in."
"Why, certainly," said the goblin, throwing the door wide open. "I didn't know you were you. Let 'em walk right in."
Jimmieboy was about to say that he didn't know how his eye or his ear or his voice could walk anywhere, but he was prevented from so doing by the sudden disappearance of the staircase, and the substitution therefor of a huge room, the splendor of which was so great that it for a moment dazzled his eyes.
"Who comes here?" said a voice in the corner of the room.
"The eye and the ear and the voice of the son of the man who did not blast the flat stone," observed the goblin, and then Jimmieboy perceived, seated upon a lustrous golden throne, a shriveled-up dwarf, who looked as if he might be a thousand years old, but who, to judge from the crown he wore upon his head, was a king.
The dwarf was clad in garments of the richest texture, and his person was luminous with jewels of the rarest sort. As the goblin announced the visitor the king rose up, and descending from the throne, made a courtly bow to Jimmieboy.
"Thrice welcome, O son of the man who did not blast the flat rock," he said. "It is only fitting that one who owes so much to the father should welcome the eye and the ear and the voice of the son, for know, O boy, that I am the lord of the Undergroundies whose kingdom would have been shattered but for your father's kindly act in sparing it."
"I suppose that blasting the rock would have spoiled all this," said Jimmieboy's voice, as his eye took in the royal magnificence of the place, while to his ears came strains of soft and sweet music. "It would have been dreadful!"
"Much more dreadful than you imagine," replied the little king. "It would have worked damage that a life-time could not have repaired."
Then the king turned to a tall, pale creature in black who sat writing at a mahogany table in one corner of the throne room, and commanded him to recite into Jimmieboy's ear how dreadful it would have been.
"Compose, O laureate," he said to the tall, pale creature, "compose a song in which the dire effects of such a blast are fully set forth."
The laureate rose from his seat, and bowing low before the king and Jimmieboy's eye, began his song, which ran in this wise:
"A half a pound of dynamite
Set in that smooth, flat stone.
Our palace would quite out of sight
Most certainly have blown.
"It would have blown our window-panes
To high Gibraltar's ledge,
And all our streets and country lanes
It would have set on edge.
"It would have knocked our royal king
As far up as the moon;
Beyond the reach of anything—
Beyond the best balloon.
"It would have taken all our pears,
Our candy and our toys,
And hurled them where the polar bears
Indulge in horrid noise.
"It would have spoiled the music-box,
And ruined all our books—
Knocked holes in all our woolen socks,
And ruined thus their looks.
"'T would have destroyed our chandeliers,
To dough turned all our pie;
And, worst of all, my little dears,
It would have injured I."
"Is that dreadful enough?" asked the laureate, turning to the king.
"It suits me," said the king. "But perhaps our friend Jimmieboy would like to have it made a little more dreadful."
"In that case," said the laureate, "I can compose a few more verses in which the blast makes the tennis-court over us cave in and bury all the cake and jam we have in the larder, or if he thinks that too much to sacrifice, and would like a little pleasure mixed in with the terribleness, the cod-liver oil bottle might be destroyed."
"I wouldn't spoil the cake and jam," said Jimmieboy's voice, in reply to this. "But the cod-liver oil might go."
"Very well," said the laureate, and then he bowed low again and sang:
"But there is balm for our annoy,
For next the blast doth spoil
Six hundred quarts—O joy! O joy!—
Of vile cod-liver oil."
"I should think you would have liked that," said Jimmieboy's voice.
"I would have," said the king, "because you know the law of this country requires the king to consume a bottle of cod-liver oil every day, and if the bottles were all broken, perhaps the law, too, would have been crushed out of existence. But, after all, I'd rather be king with cod-liver oil than have my kingdom ruined and do without it. How would you like to see our gardens?"
"Very much," said Jimmieboy. "I'm fond of flowers."
The king laughed.
"What a droll idea," he said, turning to the laureate. "The idea of flowers growing in gardens! Write me a rhyme on the drollness of the idea."
The laureate sighed. It was evident that he was getting tired of composing verses to order.
"I hear and obey," he replied, shortly, and then he recited as follows:
"To think of wasting: any time
In raising flowers, I think,
Is worse than writing nonsense-rhyme,
Or frying purple ink.
"It's queerer really than the act
Of painting sword-fish green;
Or sailing down a cataract
To please a magazine.
"Indeed, it really seems to me,
Who now am very old,
The drollest bit of drollery
That ever has been drolled."
"But what do you raise in your gardens?" asked Jimmieboy, as the laureate completed his composition.
"Nothing, of course," said the king. "What's a garden for, anyhow? Pleasure, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Jimmieboy's voice, "but——"
"There isn't any but about it," said the king. "If a garden is for pleasure it must not be worked in. Business and pleasure are two very different things, and you cannot raise flowers without working."
"But how do you get pleasure out of a garden when you don't raise anything in it?"
"Aren't you dull!" ejaculated the king. "Write me a quatrain on his dullness, O laureate."
"Confound his dullness!" muttered the laureate. "I'm rapidly wearing out, poetizing about this boy." Then he added, aloud: "Certainly, your majesty. Here it is:
"He is the very dullest lad
I've seen in all my life;
For dullness he is quite as bad
As any oyster-knife."
"Is that all?" asked the king, with a frown.
"I'm afraid four lines is as many as I can squeeze into a quatrain," said the laureate, returning the frown with interest.
"Then tell this young man's ear, sirrah, how it comes that we get pleasure out of a garden in which nothing grows."
"If I must—I suppose I must," growled the laureate; and then he recited:
"The plan is thus, O little wit,
You'll see it in a minute;
We get our pleasures out of it,
Because there's none within it."
"That is very poor poetry, Laury!" snapped the king.
"If you don't like it, don't take it," retorted the laureate. "I'm tired of this business, anyhow."
"And what, pray," cried the king, striding angrily forward to the mutinous poet, "what are you going to do about it?"
"I'm going to get up a revolution," retorted the laureate, shaking his quill pen fiercely at the king. "If I go to the people to-morrow, and promise not to write any more poetry, they'll all be so grateful they'll make me king, and set you to work wheeling coal in the mines for the mortals."
The king's face grew so dark with anger as the laureate spoke that Jimmieboy's eye could hardly see two inches before itself, and in haste the little fellow withdrew it from the scene. What happened next he never knew, but that missiles were thrown by the quarreling king and poet he was certain, for there was a tremendous shout, and something just tipped the end of his ear and went whizzing by, and rubbing his eyes, the boy looked about him, and discovered that he was still lying face downward upon the flat rock, but it was no longer transparent.
Off in the bushes directly back of him was his father, looking for a tennis ball. This, some people say, is the object that whizzed past Jimmieboy's ear, but to this day the little fellow believes that it was nothing less than the king's crown, which that worthy monarch had hurled at the laureate, that did this.
For my part I take sides with neither, for, as a matter of fact, I know nothing about it.
V.
JIMMIEBOY IN THE LIBRARY.
"I'm going to sit in this comfor'ble arm-chair by the fire," said Jimmieboy, climbing up into the capacious easy-chair in his father's library, and settling down upon its soft cushioned seat. "I've had my supper, and it was all of cold things, and I think I ought to get 'em warmed up before I go to bed."
"Very well," said his papa. "Only be careful, and keep your feet awake. It wouldn't be comfortable if your feet should go to sleep just about the time your mamma wanted you to go to bed. I'd have to carry you up stairs, if that should happen, and the doctor says if I carry you much longer I'll have a back like a dromedary."
"Oh, that would be lovely!" said Jimmieboy. "I'd just like to see you with two humps on your back—one for me, and one for my little brother."
"Dear me!" said a gruff voice at Jimmieboy's side—"Dear me! The idea of a boy of your age, with two sets of alphabet picture blocks and a dictionary right in the house, not knowing that a dromedary has only one hump! Ridiculous! Next thing you'll be trying to say that the one-eyed catteraugus has two eyes."
Jimmieboy leaned over the arm of the chair to see who it could be that spoke. It wasn't his father, that much was certain, because his father had often said that it wasn't possible to do more than three things at once, and he was now doing that many—smoking a cigar, reading a book, and playing with the locket on the end of his watch-chain.
"Who are you, anyhow?" said Jimmieboy, as he peered over the arm, and saw nothing but the Dictionary.
"I'm myself—that's who," was the answer, and then Jimmieboy was interested to see that it was nothing less than the Dictionary itself that had addressed him. "You ought to be more careful about the way you talk," added the Dictionary. "Your diction is airy without being dictionary, if you know what that means, which you don't, as the Rose remarked to the Cauliflower, when the Cauliflower said he'd be a finer Rose than the Rose if he smelled as sweet."
"I'm very sorry," Jimmieboy replied, meekly, "I forgot that the dromedary only had one hump."
"I don't believe you'd know a dromedary from a milk dairy if they both stood before you," retorted the Dictionary. "Now would you?"
"Yes, I think I would," said Jimmieboy. "The milk dairy would have cream in bottles in its windows, and the dromedary wouldn't."
"Ah, but you don't know why!" sang the Dictionary. "You don't even begin to know why the dromedary wouldn't have cream in bottles in its windows."
"No," said Jimmieboy, "I don't. Why wouldn't he?"
"Because he has no windows," laughed the Dictionary; "and between you and me, that's one of the respects in which the dromedary is like a base-drum—there isn't a solitary window in either of 'em."
"You know a terrible lot, don't you?" said Jimmieboy, patronizingly.
"Terrible isn't the word. I'm simply hideously learned," said the Dictionary. "Why, I've been called a vocabulary, I know so many words."
"I wish you'd tell me all you know," said Jimmieboy, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair, and putting his chin on the palms of his two hands. "I'd like to know more than papa does—just for once. Do you know enough to tell me anything he doesn't know?"
"Do I?" laughed the Dictionary. "Well, don't I? Rather. Why, I'm telling him things all the time. He came and asked me the other night what raucous meant, and how to spell macrobiotic."
"And did you really know?" asked Jimmieboy, full of admiration for this wonderful creature.
"Yes; and a good deal more besides. Why, if he had asked me, I could have told him what a zygomatic zoophagan is; but he never asked me. Queer, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "What is one of those things?"
"A zygomatic zoophagan? Why that's a—er—let me see," said the Dictionary, turning over his leaves. "I like to search myself pretty thoroughly before I commit myself to a definition. A zygomatic zoophagan is a sort of cheeky animal that eats other animals. You are one, though I wouldn't brag about it if I were you. You are an animal, and at times a very cheeky animal, and I've seen you eat beef. That's what makes you a zygomatic zoophagan."
"Do I bite?" asked Jimmieboy, a little afraid of himself since he had learned what a fearful creature he was.
"Only at dinner-time, and unless you are very careless about it and eat too hastily you need not be afraid. Very few zygomatic zoophagans ever bite themselves. In fact, it never happened really but once that I know of. That was the time the zoophagan got the best of the eight-winged tallahassee. Ever hear about that?"
"No, I never did," said Jimmieboy. "How did it happen?"
"This way," said the Dictionary, as he stood up and made a bow to Jimmieboy. And then he recited these lines:
"THE CALIPEE AND THE ZOOPHAGAN."
"The yellow-faced Zoophagan
Was strolling near the sea,
When from the depths of ocean
Sprang forth that dread amp-hib-ian,
The mawkish Calipee.
"The Tallahassee bird sometimes
The Calipee is called.
His eyes are round and big as dimes,
He has eight wings, composes rhymes,
His head is very bald.
"Now if there are two creatures in
This world who disagree—
Two creatures full of woe and sin—
They are the Zo-oph, pale and thin,
And that bad Calipee.
"Whene'er they meet they're sure to fight,
No matter where they are;
Nor do they stop by day or night,
Till one is beaten out of sight,
Or safety seeks afar.
"And, sad to say, the Calipee
Is stronger of the two;
And so he'd won the victory
At all times from his enemy,
The slight and slender Zoo.
"But this time it went otherwise,
For, so the story goes,
As yonder sun set in the skies,
The Calipee, to his surprise,
Was whacked square on the nose.
"Which is the fatal, mortal part
Of all the Calipees;
Much more important than the heart,
For life is certain to depart
When Cali cannot sneeze.
"The world, surprised, asked 'How was it?
How did he do it so?
Where did the Zoo get so much wit?
How did he learn so well to hit
So fatally his foe?'
"''Twas but his strategy,' then cried
The friends of little Zoo;
'As Cali plunged, our hero shied,
Ran twenty feet off to one side,
And bit himself in two.
"'And then, you see, the Calipee
Was certainly undone;
The Zo-oph beat him easily,
As it must nearly always be
When there are two to one.'
"Rather a wonderful tale that," continued the Dictionary. "I don't know that I really believe it, though. It's too great a tale for any dog to wag, eh?"
"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "I don't think I believe it either. If the zoophagan bit himself in two, I should think he'd have died. I know I would."
"No, you wouldn't," said the Dictionary; "because you couldn't. It isn't a question of would and could, but of wouldn't and couldn't. By-the-way, here's a chance for you to learn something. What's the longest letter in the alphabet?"
"They're all about the same, aren't they?" asked Jimmieboy.
"They look so, but they aren't. L is the longest. An English ell is forty-five inches long. Here's another. What letter does a Chinaman wear on his head?"
"Double eye!" cried Jimmieboy.
"That's pretty good," said the Dictionary, with an approving nod; "but you're wrong. He wears a Q. And I'll tell you why a Q is like a Chinaman. Chinamen don't amount to a row of beans, and a Q is nothing but a zero with a pig-tail. Do you know why they put A at the head of the alphabet?"
"No."
"Because Alphabet begins with an A."
"Then why don't they put T at the end of it?" asked Jimmieboy.
"They do," said the Dictionary. "I-T—it."
Jimmieboy laughed to himself. He had no idea there was so much fun in the Dictionary. "Tell me something more," he said.
"Let me see. Oh, yes," said the Dictionary, complacently. "How's this?
"'Oh, what is a yak, sir?' the young man said;
'I really much wish to hear.'
'A queer-looking cad with a bushy head,
A buffalo-robe all over him spread,
And whiskers upon his ear.'
"And tell me, I pray,' said the boy in drab,
Just what's a Thelphusi-an?'
'A great big crab with nippers that nab
Whatever the owner desires to grab—
A crusty crustace-an."
"'I'm obliged,' said the boy, with a wide, wide smirk,
As he slowly moved away.
'Will you tell me, sir, ere I go to work—
To toil till the night brings along its murk—
How high peanuts are to-day?'
"And I had to give in,
For I couldn't say;
And the boy, with a grin,
Moved off on his way."
"That was my own personal experience," said the Dictionary. "The boy was a very mean boy, too. He went about telling people that there were a great many things I didn't know, which was very true, only he never said what they were, and his friends thought they were important things, like the meaning of sagaciousness, and how many jays are there in geranium, and others. If he'd told 'em that it was things like the price of peanuts, and how are the fish biting to-day, and is your mother's seal-skin sack plush or velvet, that I didn't know, they'd not have thought it disgraceful. Oh, it was awfully mean!"
"Particularly after you had told him what those other things were," said Jimmieboy.
"Yes; but I got even with him. He came to me one day to find out what an episode was, and I told him it was a poem in hysterical hexameters, with a refrain repeated every eighteenth line, to be sung to slow music."
"And what happened?" asked Jimmieboy.
"He told his teacher that, and he was kept in for two months, and made to subtract two apples from one lunch every recess."
"Oh, my, how awful!" cried Jimmieboy.
"But it served him right. Don't you think so?" said the Dictionary.
"Yes, I do," said Jimmieboy. "But tell me. What'll I tell papa that he doesn't know?"
"Tell him that a sasspipedon is a barrel with four sides, and is open at both ends, and is a much better place for cigar ashes than his lap, because they pass through it to the floor, and so do not soil his clothes."
"Good!" said Jimmieboy, peering across the room to where his father still sat smoking. "I think I'll tell him now. Say, papa," he cried sitting up, "what is a sasspipedon?"
"I don't know. What?" answered Jimmieboy's father, laying his paper down, and coming over to where the little boy sat.
"It's a—it's a—it's an ash-barrel," said the little fellow, trying to remember what the Dictionary had said.
"Who said so?" asked papa.
"The Dictionary," answered Jimmieboy.
And when Jimmieboy's father came to examine the Dictionary on the subject, the disagreeable old book hadn't a thing to say about the sasspipedon, and Jimmieboy went up to bed wondering what on earth it all meant, anyhow.
VI.
JIMMIEBOY'S SNOWMAN.
The snow had been falling fast for well-nigh forty-eight hours and Jimmieboy was almost crazy with delight. He loved the snow because it was possible to do so much with it. One didn't need to go into a store, for instance, and part with ten cents every time one happened to want a ball, when there was snow on the ground. Then, too, Jimmieboy had a new sled he wanted to try, but best of all, his father had promised to make him a snowman, with shoe-buttons for eyes and a battered old hat on his head, if perchance there could be found anywhere in the house a hat of that sort. Fortunately a battered old hat was found, and the snowman when finished looked very well in it. I say fortunately because Jimmieboy had fully made up his mind that a battered hat was absolutely necessary to make the snowman a success, and had not the old one been found I very much fear the youth would have taken his father's new one and battered that into the state of usefulness required to complete the icy statue to his satisfaction.
After the snowman was finished Jimmieboy romped about him and shouted in great glee for an hour or more, and then, growing a little weary of the sport, he ran up into his nursery to rest for a little while. He had not been there very long however when he became, for some unknown reason, uneasy about the funny looking creature he had left behind him. Running to the window he looked out to see if the snowman was all right, and he was much surprised to discover that he wasn't there at all. He couldn't have melted, that was certain, for the air was colder than it had been when the snowman was put up. No one could have stolen him because he was too big, and so, well, it certainly was a strange conclusion, but none the less the only one, he must have walked off himself.
"It's mighty queer!" thought Jimmieboy. "He was there ten minutes ago."
Then he ran down stairs and peered out of the window. At the front of the house no snowman was in sight. Then he went to a side window and looked out. Still no snowman. And then the door-bell rang, and Jimmieboy went to the door and opened it, and, dear me! how he laughed when he saw who it was that had rung the bell, as would also have you, for, honestly, it was no one else than the snowman himself.
"What do you want?" asked Jimmieboy. The snowman made a low bow to Jimmieboy, and replied:
"I got so weary standing there,
I thought I'd ask you for a chair;
'Tis rather cool of me, I know,
But coolness in a man of snow
Is quite the fashion in these days,
And to be stylish always pays."
"Won't you come in?" asked Jimmieboy politely.
The snowman stared at Jimmieboy with all the power of the shoe-buttons. He was evidently surprised. In a moment or two, however, he recovered and said:
"Indeed, I'll enter not that door,
I've tried it once or twice before."
"What of that?" asked Jimmieboy. "Didn't you like it?"
"Oh, yes; I liked it well enough,
Although it used me pretty rough;
I lost a nose and foot and ear,
Last time I happened to come here."
"Do you always speak in rhyme?" asked Jimmieboy, noticing the snowman's habit for the first time.
"Always, except when I speak in prose," said the snowman. "But perhaps you don't like rhyme?"
"Yes, I do like rhyme very much," said Jimmieboy.
"Then you like me," said the snowman, "because I'm mostly rime myself. But say, don't stand there with the door open letting all the heat out into the world. If you want to talk to me come outside where we can be comfortable."
"Very well," said Jimmieboy. "I'll come, if you'll wait until I bundle up a little so as to keep warm."
"All right, I'll wait," the snowman answered, "only don't you get too warm. I'll take you up to where I live and introduce you to my boys if you like—only hurry. If a thaw should set in we might have trouble.
"Of all mean things I ever saw
The meanest of them is a thaw."
Jimmieboy, pondering deeply over his curious experience, quickly donned his overcoat and rubber boots, and in less time than it takes to tell it was out of doors again with the snowman. The huge white creature smiled happily as Jimmieboy came out, and taking him by the hand they went off up the road together.
"I'm glad you weren't offended with me because I wouldn't go in and sit down in your house," said the snowman, after they had walked a little way. "I had a very narrow escape thirty winters ago when I was young and didn't know any better than to accept an invitation of that sort. I lived in Russia then, and a small boy very much like you asked me to go into his house with him and see some funny picture-books he had. I said all right, and in I went, never thinking that the house was hot and that I'd be in danger of melting away. The boy got out his picture-books and we sat down before a blazing log fire. Suddenly the boy turned white as I was, and cried out:
"'Hi! What have you done with your leg?'
"'I brought it in with me, didn't I?' I said, looking down to where the leg ought to be, and noticing much to my concern that it was gone.
"'I thought so,' said the boy. 'Maybe you left it down on the hat-rack with your hat and cane.'
"'Well I wish you'd go and see,' said I, very nervously. 'I don't want to lose that leg if I can help it.'
"So off the boy went," continued the snowman, "and I waited there before the fire wondering what on earth had become of the missing limb. The boy soon came back and announced that he couldn't find it.
"'Then I must hop around until I do find it,' I put in, starting up. Would you believe it, Jimmieboy, that the minute I tried to rise and hop off on the search I discovered that my other leg was gone too?"
"Dear me!" said Jimmieboy. "How dreadful."
"It was fearful," returned the snowman, "but that wasn't half. I raised my hand to my forehead so as to think better, when off dropped my right arm, and as I reached out with my left to pick it up again that dropped off too. Then as my vest also disappeared, the boy cried out:
"'Why, I know what's the matter. You are melting away!'
"He was right. The heat of the log fire was just withering me right up. Fortunately as my neck began to go and my head rolled off the chair onto the floor, the boy had presence of mind enough to pick it up—it was all that was left of me—and throw it out of the window. If it hadn't been for that timely act of his I should have met the horrid fate of my cousin the iceberg."
"What was that?" asked Jimmieboy.
"Oh, he wanted to travel," said the snowman, "so he floated off down to South America and waked up one morning to find himself nothing but a tankful of the Gulf of Mexico. We never saw the poor fellow again."
"I understand now why you didn't want to come in," said Jimmieboy, "and I'm glad you didn't do as I asked you, for I don't think mamma would have been pleased if you'd melted away in the parlor."
"I know she wouldn't," said the snowman. "She's like the woman mentioned in the poem, who
"—hated flies and muddy shoes,
As well as pigs and kangaroos;
But most of all she did abhor,
A melted snow-drift on the floor."
"Do you live near here?" asked Jimmieboy as he trudged along at the snowman's side.
"Well," replied the snowman, "I do, and I don't. When I do, I do, and when I don't, it's otherwise. This climate doesn't agree with me in the summer, and so when summer comes I move up to the North Pole. Ever been there?"
"No," said Jimmieboy, "what sort of a place is it?"
"Fine," returned the snowman. "The thermometer is always at least twenty miles below zero, even on the hottest days, and fire can't by any possibility come near us. Only one fire ever tried to and it was frozen stiff before it got within a hundred leagues of us. In winter, however, I come to places like this, and bring my little boys with me. We hire a convenient snow-drift and live in that. There's mine now right ahead of you."
Jimmieboy peered curiously along the road, at the far end of which he could see a huge mound of snow like the one the famous blizzard had piled up in front of his father's house some time before Jimmieboy and the world came to know each other.
"Do you live in that?" he asked.
"Yes," said the snowman. "And I will say that it's one of the most conveniently arranged snow-drifts I ever lived in. The house part of it is always as cold as ice—it's cooled by a special kind of refrigerator I had put in, which consumes about half a ton of ice a week."
Jimmieboy laughed.
"It's a cold furnace, eh?" he said.
"Precisely," answered the snowman. "And besides that the house is deliciously draughty so that we have no difficulty in keeping cold. Once in a while my boys run in the sun and get warmed through, but I dose 'em up with ice-water and cold cream and they soon get chilled again. But come, shall we go in?"
The pedestrians had by this time reached the side of the snow-drift, and Jimmieboy was pleased to see a door at one side of it. This the snowman opened, and they entered together a marvelously beautiful and extensive garden glistening with frosty flowers and snow-clad trees. At the end of the garden was a little white house that looked like the icing on Jimmieboy's birthday cake. As they approached it, the door of the little house was thrown open and a dozen small-sized snow boys rushed out and began to pelt the snowman and Jimmieboy with tennis balls.
"Hold up, boys," cried the snowman. "I've brought a friend home to see you."
The boys stopped at once, and Jimmieboy was introduced to them. For hours they entertained him in the gardens and in the house. They showed him wondrous snow toys, among which were rocking horses, railway trains, soldiers—all made of the same soft fleecy substance from which the snowman and his children were constructed. When he had played for a long time with these they gave him caramels and taffy and cream cakes, these also made of snow, though as far as their taste went they were better than those made of sugar and chocolate and cream, or, at least, it seemed so to Jimmieboy at the time.
After this bit of luncheon the boys invited him out to coast, and he went along with them to the top of a high hill without any snow upon it, and for hours he and they slid from summit to base in great red-wheeled wagons. It took his breath away the first time he went down, but when he got used to it he found the sport delightful. He was glad, however, when a voice from the little white house called to the children to return.
"Come in now, boys," it said. "It is getting too warm for you to stay out."
The boys were obedient to the word and they all—a dozen of them at least—trooped back into the house where Jimmieboy was welcomed by his friend the snowman again. The snowman looked a little anxious, Jimmieboy thought, but he supposed this was because the littlest snowboy had overheated himself at his play and had come in minus two fingers and an ear. It was not this, however, that bothered him, as Jimmieboy found out in a few minutes, for the snowman simply restored the missing fingers and the ear by making a new lot for the little fellow out of a handful of snow he got in the garden. Anything so easily replaced was not worth worrying over. The real cause of his anxiety came out when the father of this happy little family of snow boys called Jimmieboy to one side.
"You must go home right away," he said. "I'm sorry, but we have got to fly just as hard as we can or we are lost."
"But——" said Jimmieboy.
"Don't ask for reasons," returned the snowman, gathering his little snowboys together and rushing off with them in tow. "I haven't time to give them. Just read that and you'll see. Farewell."
Then he made off down the garden path, and as he fled with his babies Jimmieboy picked up the thing the snowman had told him to read, and wandered back into the house, holding it in his hand. It was only a newspaper, but at the top of the first column was an announcement in huge letters:
WARM WAVE TO-NIGHT.
WISE SNOWMEN WILL MOVE NORTH AT ONCE.
When Jimmieboy saw this he knew right away why he had been deserted, but to this day he doesn't know how he knew it, because at the time this happened he had not learned how to read. At all events he discovered what the trouble was instantly, and then he decided that as he had been left by all of his new friends he would go home. He walked to the front door and opened it, and what do you suppose it opened into?
The garden?
Not a bit of it.
Into Jimmieboy's nursery itself, and when the door closed upon him after he had stepped through it into the nursery and Jimmieboy turned to look at it, lo, and behold it wasn't there!
Nor was the snowman to be found the next morning. It was quite evident that he had got away from the warm wave that appeared on the scene the night before, for there wasn't even a sign of the shoe-button eyes or the battered hat, as there certainly would have been had he melted instead of run away.
VII.
THE BICYCLOPÆDIA BIRD.
"Boo!" said something.
And Jimmieboy of course was startled. So startled was he that, according to his own statement, he jumped ninety-seven feet, though for my own part I don't believe he really jumped more than thirty-three. He was too sleepy to count straight anyhow. He had been lolling under his canvas tent down near the tennis-court all the afternoon, getting lazier and lazier every minute, and finally he had turned over square on his back, put his head on a small cushion his mamma had made for him, closed his eyes, and then came the "Boo!"
"I wonder—" he said, as he gazed about him, seeing no sign of any creature that could by any possibility say "Boo!" however.
"Of course you do. That's why I've come," interrupted a voice from the bushes. "More children of your age suffer from the wonders than from measles, mumps, or canthaves."
"What are canthaves?" asked Jimmieboy.
"Canthaves are things you can't have. Don't you ever suffer because you can't have things?" queried the voice.
"Oh, yes, indeed!" returned Jimmieboy. "Lots and lots of times."
"And didn't you ever have the wonders so badly that you got cross and wouldn't eat anything but sweet things for dinner?" the voice asked.
"I don't know exactly what you mean by the wonders," replied Jimmieboy.
"Why, wonders is a disease that attacks boys who want to know why things are and can't find out," said the voice.
"Oh, my, yes I've had that lots of times," laughed Jimmieboy. "Why, only this morning I asked my papa why there weren't any dandelionesses, and he wouldn't tell me because he said he had to catch a train, and I've been wondering why ever since."
"I thought you'd had it; all boys do get it sooner or later, and it's a thing you can have any number of times unless you have me around," said the voice.
"What are you anyhow?" asked Jimmieboy.
"I'm what they call the Encyclopædia Bird. I'm a regular owl for wisdom. I know everything—just like the Cyclopædia; and I have two wheels instead of legs, which is why they call me the Bicyclopædia Bird. I can't let you see me, because these are not my office hours. I can only be seen between ten and two on the thirty-second of March every seventeenth year. You can get a fair idea of what I look like from my photograph, though."