diff --git "a/data/test/34467.txt" "b/data/test/34467.txt"
new file mode 100644--- /dev/null
+++ "b/data/test/34467.txt"
@@ -0,0 +1,4652 @@
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IN CAMP WITH A TIN SOLDIER.
+
+
+
+
+    IN CAMP WITH A TIN SOLDIER
+
+    BY
+    JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
+
+    ILLUSTRATED BY
+    E. M. ASHE
+
+    [Illustration]
+
+    NEW YORK
+    R. H. RUSSELL & SON
+    MDCCCXCII
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1892.
+    BY JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.
+
+
+
+
+    TO
+    RUSSELL.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE START.
+
+
+"Br-r-r-rub-a-dub-dub! Br-r-r-rub-a-dub-a-dub-dub!
+Br-r-r-rub-adub-dub-a-dub-dub-a-dub-dub!"
+
+"What's that?" cried Jimmieboy, rising from his pillow on the nursery
+couch, and looking about him, his eyes wide open with astonishment.
+
+"What's what?" asked mamma, who was sitting near at hand, knitting a
+pair of socks for a small boy she knew who would shortly want them to
+keep his feet warm when he went off coasting with his papa.
+
+"I thought I heard soldiers going by," returned Jimmieboy, climbing up
+on the window-sill and gazing anxiously up and down the street. "There
+were drums playing."
+
+"I didn't hear them," said mamma. "I guess you imagined it. Better lie
+down again, Jimmieboy, and rest. You will be very tired when papa gets
+home, and you know if you are tired you'll have to go to bed instead of
+taking supper with him, and that would be too bad on his birthday."
+
+"Is papa really going to have a birthday to-day?" queried the little
+fellow. "And a cake with candles in it?"
+
+"Yes," answered mamma. "Two cakes with candles on them, I think," she
+added.
+
+"What's he to have two cakes for? I had only one," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"One cake wouldn't be big enough to hold all the candles," mamma
+answered. "You see, papa is a few years older than you are--almost six
+times as old to-day, and if he has a candle for every year, he'll have
+to have two cakes to hold them all."
+
+"Is papa six years old to-day?" asked Jimmieboy, resuming his recumbent
+position on the pillow.
+
+"Oh, indeed, yes, he's thirty," said mamma.
+
+"How many is thirty?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"Never mind, dearest," returned mamma, giving Jimmieboy a kiss. "Don't
+you bother about that. Just close those little peepers and go to
+sleep."
+
+So Jimmieboy closed his eyes and lay very still for a few minutes. He
+was not sorry to do it, either, because he really was quite sleepy. He
+ought to have had his nap before luncheon, but his mamma had been so
+busy all the morning, making ready for his papa's birthday dinner, that
+she had forgotten to call him in from the playground, where he was so
+absorbed in the glorious sport of seesawing with his little friend from
+across the way that he never even thought of his nap. As many as five
+minutes must have slipped by before Jimmieboy opened his eyes again, and
+I doubt if he would have done so even then had he not heard repeated the
+unmistakable sounds of drums.
+
+"I did hear 'em that time, mamma," he cried, starting up again and
+winking very hard, for the sand-man had left nearly a pint of sand in
+Jimmieboy's eyes. "I heard 'em plain as could be."
+
+To this second statement of Jimmieboy's that he heard soldiers going by
+somewhere, there was no answer, for there was no one in the room to give
+him one. His mamma, supposing that he had finally fallen asleep, had
+tiptoed out of the room and was now down stairs, so that the little
+fellow found himself alone. As a rule he did not like to be alone,
+although he knew of no greater delight than that of conversing with
+himself, and he was on the point of running to the door to call to his
+mother to return, when his attention was arrested by some very curious
+goings-on in a favorite picture of his that hung directly over the
+fire-place.
+
+This picture was not, under ordinary circumstances, what any one would
+call a lively picture--in fact, it was usually a very quiet one,
+representing a country lane shaded on either side by great oak-trees
+that towered up into the sky, their branches overhanging the road so as
+to form a leafy arch, through which only an occasional ray of the sun
+ever found its way. From one end to the other of this beautiful avenue
+there were no signs of life, save those which were presented by the
+green leaves of the trees themselves, and the purling brook, bordered by
+grasses and mosses, that was visible a short distance in; no houses or
+cows or men or children were there in sight. Indeed, had it not been for
+a faint glimmering of sunlight at the far end of the road, some persons
+might have thought it a rather gloomy scene, and I am not sure but that
+even Jimmieboy, had he not wondered what there could be beyond the
+forest, and around the turn which the road took at that other end,
+would have found the picture a little depressing. It was his interest in
+what might possibly lie beyond the point at which the picture seemed to
+stop that had made it so great a favorite with him, and he had
+frequently expressed a desire to take a stroll along that road, to fish
+in the little stream, and to explore the hidden country around the turn.
+
+So great was his interest in it at one time, that Jimmieboy's papa, who
+was a great person for finding out things, promised to write to the man
+who had painted the picture and ask him all about the unseen land, so
+that his little son's curiosity might be satisfied, a promise which he
+must have kept, for some days later, on his return from business, he
+took a piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to Jimmieboy, saying
+that there was the artist's answer. Jimmieboy couldn't read it, of
+course, because at that time he had not even learned his letters, so he
+got his papa to do it for him, and they made the pleasing discovery that
+the artist was a poet as well as a painter, for the answer was all in
+rhyme. If I remember rightly, this is the way it read:
+
+    AROUND THE TURN.
+
+    Around the turn are kings and queens;
+      Around the turn are dogs and cats;
+    Around the turn are pease and beans,
+      And handsome light blue derby hats.
+
+    Around the turn are grizzly bears;
+      Around the turn are hills and dales;
+    Around the turn are mice and hares,
+      And cream and milk in wooden pails.
+
+    Indeed, you'll find there horses, pigs,
+      Great seas and cities you'll discern;
+    All things, in fact, including figs,
+      For all the world lies round the turn.
+
+This explanation was quite satisfactory to Jimmieboy, although he was a
+little fearful as to what might happen if the grizzly bears should take
+it into their heads to come down into the nursery and hug him, which was
+certainly not an unlikely thing for them to do, for the mice had
+come--he had seen them himself--and his mamma had often said that he was
+a most huggable little fellow.
+
+Now there was undoubtedly some sign of life down the road, for Jimmieboy
+could see it with his own eyes. There was something moving there, and
+that something was dressed in gay colors, and in front of it was
+something else that shone brightly as an occasional ray of the sun
+shimmered through the trees and glistened upon it. In an instant all
+thought of his mamma had flown from his mind, so absorbed was he by the
+startling discovery he had made up there in the picture. To turn back
+from the door and walk over to the fire-place was the work of a moment,
+and to climb up on the fender and gaze into the picture occupied hardly
+more than another moment, and then Jimmieboy saw what it was that was
+moving down the road, and with delighted ears heard also what that other
+thing was that preceded the moving thing.
+
+The first thing was a company of tin soldiers marching in perfect time,
+their colors flying and the captain on horseback; and the other thing in
+front was a full brass band, discoursing a most inspiring military march
+in a fashion that set Jimmieboy strutting about the nursery like a
+general.
+
+As the little fellow strode around the room his step was suddenly
+arrested by a voice immediately at his feet.
+
+"Hi, there, Jimmieboy!" it said. "Please be careful where you are
+walking. You nearly stepped on me that time."
+
+Jimmieboy stopped short and looked down upon the floor.
+
+"Hello!" he said. "What are you doing there, colonel?"--for it was none
+other than the colonel of the tin soldiers himself who had thus
+requested him to look out where he stepped.
+
+"There's trouble on hand," said the colonel, climbing up on to a
+footstool so as to be nearer Jimmieboy's ear, for he did not wish to
+alarm everybody by shouting out the dreadful news he had to impart.
+Jimmieboy's mamma, for instance, was a timid little woman, and she would
+have been very much frightened if she had known what had happened.
+"There's a great deal of trouble on hand," the colonel repeated. "The
+Noah in your ark fell asleep last night before the animals had gone to
+bed, and while he was napping, the Parallelopipedon got loose, ate up
+the gingerbread monkey and four peppermint elephants, and escaped out of
+the back window to the woods. Noah didn't find it out until an hour ago,
+when he went to feed the elephants, and immediately he made the
+discovery word came from the Pannikins, who live around the turn there
+in the woods, that the Parallelopipedon had eaten the roof off their
+house, and was at the time the letter was written engaged in whittling
+down the fences with a jackknife, and rolling all the pumpkins down the
+mountainside into Tiddledywinkland, and ruining the whole country. We
+have got to capture that animal before breakfast. If we don't, there's
+no telling what may happen. He might even go so far as to come back, and
+that would be horrible."
+
+"I don't think I remember the Parawelopipedon," said Jimmieboy,
+pronouncing the animal's name with some difficulty. "What kind of an
+animal was that?"
+
+"Oh, he's an awful animal," returned the colonel. "I don't blame you for
+not remembering him, though, because he is a hard animal to remember. He
+is the only animal they had like him in the ark. They couldn't find two
+of his sort, and I rather guess they are glad they couldn't, because his
+appetite is simply dreadful, and the things he eats are most
+embarrassing. He's the one your papa was telling you about last night
+before you went to bed. Don't you remember the rhyme he told
+you--beginning this way:
+
+    'The Parallelopipedon
+       I do not like, because
+     He has so many, many sides,
+       And ninety-seven claws'?"
+
+"Oh, yes," replied Jimmieboy. "He is the same animal that----
+
+    'Hasn't got a bit of sense,
+       Or feather to his name;
+     No eye, no ear with which to hear,
+       But gets there just the same.'"
+
+"That's it! that's it!" cried the colonel. "And don't you remember,
+
+    'There's not a thing he will not eat,
+      From pie to sealing-wax,
+    Although he shows a preference for
+      Red bricks and carpet tacks'?"
+
+"Yes, I remember that very well now," said Jimmieboy. "Wasn't there a
+verse about his color, too? Didn't it say:
+
+    'His color is a fearful one--
+       A combination hue
+     Of yellow, green, and purple, mixed
+       With solferino blue'?"
+
+"No; that was the Parallelogram," replied the colonel. "A
+Parallelopipedon is six times as bad as a Parallelogram. His color has a
+verse about it, though, that says:
+
+    'His hue is the most terrible
+       That ever man has seen;
+     'Tis pink and saffron, blue and red,
+       Mixed up with apple green'."
+
+"Dear me!" cried Jimmieboy. "And do you mean to say he's really got
+away?"
+
+"I do, indeed," returned the colonel. "Got away, and Noah is glad of it,
+because he doesn't have to feed him any more. But it'll never do to let
+him stay loose; he will do too much damage. Why, Jimmieboy, suppose he
+should overeat himself and die? He's the only one in the world, and we
+can't afford to lose an animal like that; besides, after he has ruined
+all the country around the turn, it's just as like as not he'll begin on
+the rest of the picture, and eat it all up, frame and all."
+
+"My!" cried the little boy. "That would be terrible, wouldn't it! You
+are right--he must be captured. I have half a mind to go along with you
+and help."
+
+"Half a mind isn't enough," retorted the colonel, shaking his head. "You
+can't go into the soldier business unless you have a whole mind--so
+good-by, Jimmieboy. I must be running along; and should I not return, as
+the poet says,
+
+    'Pray do not weep for me, my boy,
+       But, as the years slip by,
+     Drop all your pennies in a bank--
+       Brave soldiers never die;
+     And some day I'll turn up again,
+       Exalted, high in rank,
+     And possibly I'll find some use
+       For that small sum in bank.'"
+
+"I'm not going to stay here while you are fighting," said Jimmieboy,
+with a determined shake of his head. "I've got a whole mind to go with
+you, and a uniform to wear as well. But tell me, can I get up there on
+the road?"
+
+"Certainly," said the colonel. "I'll show you how, only put on your
+uniform first. They won't let you go unless you are suitably dressed.
+Little boys, with striped trousers like yours, would be out of place,
+but with a uniform such as yours is, with real gold on the cap and brass
+buttons on the coat--well, I'm not sure but what they'll elect you
+water-carrier, or general, or something equally important."
+
+So Jimmieboy hurried to his clothes-closet and quickly donned his
+military suit, and grasping his sword firmly by the hilt, cried out:
+
+"Ready!"
+
+"All right," said the colonel. "They are waiting for us. Close your
+eyes."
+
+Jimmieboy did as he was told.
+
+"One--two--three--eyes open!" cried the colonel.
+
+Again Jimmieboy did as he was ordered, although he couldn't see why he
+should obey the colonel, who up to this afternoon had been entirely
+subject to his orders. He opened his eyes at the command, and, much to
+his surprise, found himself standing in the middle of that wooded road
+in the picture, beneath the arching trees, the leaves of which rustled
+softly as a sweet perfumed breeze blew through the branches. About him
+on every side were groups of tin soldiers talking excitedly about the
+escape of the devastating Parallelopipedon, every man of them armed to
+the teeth and eager for the colonel's command to start off on the search
+expedition. The band was playing merrily under the trees up the road
+near the little brook, and back in the direction from which he had come,
+through the heavy gilt frame, Jimmieboy could see the nursery just as he
+had left it, while before him lay the turn at the end of the wood and
+the unknown country now soon to be explored.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+JIMMIEBOY RECEIVES HIS ORDERS.
+
+
+For a few moments Jimmieboy was so overcome by the extreme novelty of
+his position that he could do nothing but wander in and out among the
+trees, wondering if he really was himself, and whether the soldiers by
+whom he was surrounded were tin or creatures of flesh and blood. They
+certainly looked and acted like human beings, and they talked in a
+manner entirely different from what Jimmieboy was accustomed to expect
+from the little pieces of painted tin he had so often played with on the
+nursery floor, but he very soon learned that they were tin, and not made
+up, like himself, of bone and sinew.
+
+The manner of his discovery was this: One of the soldiers, in a very
+rash and fool-hardy fashion, tried to pick up a stone from the road to
+throw at a poor little zinc robin that was whistling in the trees above
+his head, and in bending over after the stone and then straightening
+himself up to take aim, he snapped himself into two distinct pieces--as
+indeed would any other tin soldier, however strong and well made, and of
+course Jimmieboy was then able to see that the band with whom he had for
+the moment cast his fortunes were nothing more nor less than bits of
+brittle tin, to whom in some mysterious way had come life. The boy was
+pained to note the destruction of the little man who had tried to throw
+the stone at the robin, because he was always sorry for everybody upon
+whom trouble had come, but he was not, on the whole, surprised at the
+soldier's plight, for the simple reason that he had been taught that
+boys who threw stones at the harmless little birds in the trees were
+naughty and worthy of punishment, and he could not see why a tin soldier
+should not be punished for doing what a small boy of right feelings
+would disdain to do.
+
+After he had made up his mind that his companions were really of tin, he
+became a bit fearful as to his own make-up, and the question that he now
+asked himself was, "Am I tin, too, or what?" He was not long in
+answering this question to his own satisfaction, for after bending his
+little fingers to and fro a dozen or more times, he was relieved to
+discover that he had not changed. The fingers did not snap off, as he
+had feared they might, and he was glad.
+
+Barely had Jimmieboy satisfied himself on this point when a handsomely
+dressed soldier, on a blue lead horse, came galloping up, and cried out
+so loud that his voice echoed through the tall trees of the forest:
+
+"Is General Jimmieboy here?"
+
+"Jimmieboy is here," answered the little fellow. "I'm Jimmieboy, but I
+am no general."
+
+"But you have on a general's uniform," said the soldier.
+
+"Have I?" queried Jimmieboy, with a glance at his clothes. "Well, if I
+have, it's because they are the only soldier clothes I own."
+
+"Well, I am very sorry," said the soldier on horseback, "but if you wear
+those clothes you've got to be general. It's a hard position to occupy,
+and of course you'd rather be a high-private or a member of the band,
+but as it is, there is no way out of it. If the clothes would fit any
+one else here, you might exchange with him; but they won't, I can tell
+that by looking at the yellow stripes on your trousers. The stripes
+alone are wider than any of our legs."
+
+"Oh!" responded Jimmieboy, "I don't mind being general. I'd just as lief
+be a general as not; I know how to wave a sword and march ahead of the
+procession."
+
+At this there was a roar of laughter from the soldiers.
+
+"How queer!" said one.
+
+"What an absurd idea!" cried another.
+
+"Where did he ever get such notions as that?" said a third.
+
+And then they all laughed again.
+
+"I am afraid," said the soldier on horseback, with a kindly smile which
+won Jimmieboy's heart, "that you do not understand what the duties of a
+general are in this country. We aren't bound down by the notions of you
+nursery people, who seem to think that all a general is good for is to
+be stood up in front of a cannon loaded with beans, and knocked over
+half a dozen times in the course of a battle. Have you ever read those
+lines of High-private Tinsel in his little book, 'Poems in Pewter,' in
+which he tells of the trials of a general of the tin soldiers?"
+
+"Of course I haven't," said Jimmieboy. "I can't read."
+
+"Just the man for a general, if he can't read," said one of the
+soldiers. "He'll never know what the newspapers say of him."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you the story," said the horseman, dismounting, and
+standing on a stump by the road-side to give better effect to the poem,
+which he recited as follows:
+
+    "THE TIN SOLDIER GENERAL.
+
+         I walked one day
+         Along the way
+     That leads from camp to city;
+         And I espied
+         At the road-side
+     The hero of my ditty.
+
+         His massive feet,
+         In slippers neat,
+     Were crossed in desperation;
+         And from his eyes
+         Salt tears did rise
+     In awful exudation."
+
+"In what?" asked Jimmieboy, who was not quite used to grown-up words
+like exudation.
+
+"Quarts," replied the soldier, with a frown. "Don't interrupt. This poem
+isn't good for much unless it goes right through without a stop--like an
+express train."
+
+And then he resumed:
+
+        "It filled my soul
+         With horrid dole
+     To see this wailing creature;
+         How tears did sweep,
+         And furrow deep,
+     Along his nasal feature!
+
+         My eyes grew dim
+         To look at him,
+     To see his tear-drops soiling
+         His necktie bold,
+         His trimmings gold,
+     And all his rich clothes spoiling;
+
+         And so I stopped,
+         Beside him dropped,
+     And quoth, 'Wilt tell me, mortal,
+         Wherefore you sighed?'
+         And he replied:
+     'Wilt I? Well, I shouldst chortle.'"
+
+"I don't know what chortle means," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Neither do I," said the soldier. "But I guess the man who wrote the
+poem did, so it's all right, and we may safely go on to the next verse,
+which isn't very different in its verbiology--"
+
+"Its wha-a-at?" cried a dozen tin soldiers at once.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the declaiming soldier, severely, "there are some
+words in our language which no creature should be asked to utter more
+than once in a life-time, and that is one of them. I shall not endanger
+my oratorical welfare by speaking it again. Suffice it for me to say
+that if you want to use that word yourselves, you will find it in the
+dictionary somewhere under F, or Z, or Ph, or some other letter which I
+cannot at this moment recall. But the poem goes on to say:
+
+        "Then as we sat
+         The road-side at--
+     His tears a moment quelling--
+         In accents pale
+         He told the tale
+     Which I am also telling."
+
+"Dear me!" said a little green corporal at Jimmieboy's side. "Hasn't he
+begun the story yet?"
+
+"Yes, stupid," said a high-private. "Of course he has; but it's one of
+those stories that take a long time to begin, and never finish until the
+very end."
+
+"Oh yes, I know," said another. "It's a story like one I heard of the
+other day. You can lay it down whenever you want to, and be glad to have
+the chance."
+
+"That's it," said the high-private.
+
+"I wish you fellows would keep still," said the soldier who was
+reciting. "I ought to have been a quarter of the way through the first
+half of that poem by this time, and instead of that I'm only a sixteenth
+of the way through the first eighth."
+
+"You can't expect to go more than eight miles an hour," said the
+corporal, "even in poetry like that. It can't be done."
+
+"But what happened?" asked Jimmieboy, who was quite interested to hear
+the rest of the poem.
+
+"I'll have to tell you some other time, general," replied the soldier.
+"These tin warriors here haven't any manners. Some day, when you have
+time to spare, I'll tell you the rest of it, because I know you'll be
+glad to hear it."
+
+"Yes, general," put in the corporal, with a laugh. "Some day when you
+have a year to spare get him to tell you the first twenty-seventh of the
+next ninety-sixth of it. It won't take him more than eleven months and
+thirty-two days to do it."
+
+"Bah!" said the poetic soldier, mounting his horse and riding off with
+an angry flush on his cheek. "Some day, when I get promoted to the
+ranks, I'll get even with you."
+
+"Who is he, anyhow?" asked Jimmieboy, as the soldier rode off.
+
+"He's Major Blueface, and he has to look after the luggage," replied the
+corporal. "And as for that poem of his, Jimmieboy, I want to warn you.
+He has a printed copy of it that takes seven trunks to carry. He says it
+was written by High-private Tinsel, but that's all nonsense. He wrote it
+himself."
+
+"Then I like it all the better," said Jimmieboy. "I always like what
+people I like write."
+
+"There's no accounting for tastes," returned the corporal. "We don't any
+of us like the major. That's why we made him major. Looking after
+luggage is such awfully hard work, we didn't want to make any one else
+do it, and so we elected him."
+
+"Why don't you like him?" asked Jimmieboy. "He seems to me to be a very
+nice soldier."
+
+"That's just it," returned the corporal. "He's just the kind of soldier
+to please little boys like you, and he'd look perfectly splendid in a
+white and gold parlor like your mamma's, but in camp he's a terror.
+Keeps his boots shined up like a looking-glass; wears his Sunday uniform
+all the time; in fact, he has seven Sunday uniforms--one for each day of
+the week; and altogether he makes the rest of us feel so mean and cheap
+that we can't like him. He offered a prize once to the soldier who'd
+like him the best, and who do you think won it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Jimmieboy. "Who?"
+
+"He won it himself," retorted the corporal. "Nobody else tried. But
+you'd better go over to the colonel's quarters right away, Jimmieboy.
+You know he wants you."
+
+"He hasn't sent for me, has he?" asked the boy.
+
+"Of course he has. That's what the major came to tell you," answered the
+corporal.
+
+"But he didn't say so," returned Jimmieboy.
+
+"No, he never does what he is sent to do," explained the corporal.
+"That's how we know. If he had told you the colonel wanted you, we'd all
+know the colonel didn't want you. He's a queer bird, that major. He's so
+anxious to read his poem to somebody that he always forgets his orders,
+and when he does half remember what he is sent to do, we can tell what
+the orders are by what he doesn't say."
+
+"I shouldn't think he'd be a good man to look after the luggage if he
+forgets everything that way," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"That's just where he's great," returned the corporal. "For, don't you
+see, every man in the regiment wants to carry about three times as much
+luggage as he ought to, and the major makes it all right by forgetting
+two-thirds of it. Oh, there's no denying that he's one of the greatest
+luggage men there ever was; but you run along now, or the colonel may
+lose his temper, and that always delays things."
+
+"I'm not afraid of the colonel," said Jimmieboy, bravely.
+
+"Neither are we," said the corporal, in reply to this, "but we don't
+like to have our campaign delayed, and when the colonel loses his temper
+we have to wait and wait until he finds it again. Sometimes it takes him
+a whole week."
+
+So Jimmieboy, wondering more and more at the singular habits of the tin
+soldiers, ran off in search of the colonel, whom he found sitting by the
+brook-side fishing, and surrounded by his staff.
+
+"Hello!" said Jimmieboy, as he caught sight of the colonel. "Having any
+luck?"
+
+"Lots," said the colonel. "Been here only five minutes, and I've caught
+three hickory twigs, a piece of wire, and one of the finest colds in my
+head I ever had."
+
+"Good," said Jimmieboy, with a laugh. "But aren't there any fish there?"
+
+"Plenty of 'em," answered the colonel. "But they're all so small I'd
+have to throw 'em back if I caught 'em. They know that well enough, and
+so save me trouble by not biting. But I say, I suppose you know we can't
+start this expedition without ammunition?"
+
+"What's that?" queried Jimmieboy, to whom the word ammunition was
+entirely new.
+
+"Ammunition? Why, that's stuff to load our guns with," returned the
+colonel. "You must be a great general not to know that."
+
+"You must excuse me," said Jimmieboy, with a blush. "There is a great
+deal that I don't know. I'm only five years old, and papa hasn't had
+time to tell me everything yet."
+
+"Well, it's all right, anyhow," replied the colonel. "You'll learn a
+great deal in the next hundred years, so we won't criticise; but of
+course, you know, we can't go off without ammunition any more than a gun
+can. Now, as general of the forces, it is your duty to look about you
+and lay in the necessary supplies. For the guns we shall need about
+fourteen thousand rounds of preserved cherries, seventeen thousand
+rounds of pickled peaches for the cannon, and a hundred and sixty-two
+dozen cans of strawberry jam for me."
+
+Jimmieboy's eyes grew so round and large as he listened to these words
+that the major turned pale.
+
+"Then," continued the colonel, "we have to have powder and shell, of
+course. Perhaps four hundred and sixteen pounds of powdered sugar and
+ninety-seven barrels of shells with almonds in 'em would do for our
+purposes."
+
+"But--but what are we to do with all these things, and where am I to
+get them?" gasped Jimmieboy, beginning to be very sorry that he had
+accepted so important a position as that of general.
+
+"Do with 'em?" cried the colonel. "What'll we do with 'em? Why, capture
+the Parallelopipedon, of course. What did you suppose we'd do with
+'em--throw them at canary-birds?"
+
+"You don't load guns with preserved cherries, do you?" asked the boy.
+
+"We don't, eh? Well, I just guess we do," returned the colonel. "And we
+load the cannon with pickled peaches, and to keep me from deserting and
+going over to the enemy, they keep me loaded to the muzzle with
+strawberry jam from the time I start until we get back."
+
+"You can't kill a Parawelopipedon with cherries and peaches, can you?"
+asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"Not quite, but nearly," said the colonel. "We never hit him with enough
+of them to kill him, but just try to coax him with 'em, don't you see?
+We don't do as you do in your country. We don't shoot the enemy with
+lead bullets, and try to kill him and make him unhappy. We try to coax
+him back by shooting sweetmeats at him, and if he won't be coaxed, we
+bombard him with pickled peaches until they make him sick, and then he
+has to surrender."
+
+"It must be pretty fine to be an enemy," said Jimmieboy, smacking his
+lips as he thought of being bombarded with sweetmeats.
+
+"It is," exclaimed the colonel, with enthusiasm. "It's so nice, that
+they have to do the right thing by me in the matter of jam to keep me
+from being an enemy myself."
+
+"But what do I get?" returned Jimmieboy, who couldn't see why it would
+not be pleasant for him to be an enemy, and get all these delightful
+things.
+
+"You? Why, you get the almonds and the powdered sugar and all the
+mince-pie you can eat--what more do you want?" said the colonel.
+
+"Nothing," gasped Jimmieboy, overcome by the prospect. "I wouldn't mind
+being a general for a million years at that rate."
+
+With which noble sentiment the little fellow touched his cap to the
+colonel, and set off, accompanied by a dozen soldiers, to find the
+cherries, the peaches, the almonds, and the powdered sugar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MAJOR BLUEFACE TRIES TO ASSIST.
+
+
+The expedition under Jimmieboy's command had hardly been under way a
+quarter of an hour when the youthful general realized that the colonel
+had not told him where the cherries and peaches and other necessary
+supplies were to be found.
+
+"Dear me," he said, stopping short in the road. "I don't know anything
+about this country, and I am sure I sha'n't be able to find all those
+good things--except in my mamma's pantry, and it would never do for me
+to take 'em from there. I might have to fight cook to get 'em, and that
+would be dreadful."
+
+"Yes, it would," said Major Blueface, riding up as Jimmieboy spoke these
+words. "It would be terribly awful, for if you should fight with her
+now, she wouldn't make you a single pancake or pie or custard or
+anything after you got back."
+
+"I'm glad you've come," said Jimmieboy, with a sigh of relief. "Perhaps
+you can tell me what I've got to do to get that ammu--that ammu--oh,
+that ammuknow, don't you?"
+
+"Ammunition?" suggested the major.
+
+"Yes, that's it," said Jimmieboy. "Could you tell me where to get it?"
+
+"I could; but, really," returned the major, "I'm very much afraid I'd
+better not, unless you'll promise not to pay any attention to what I
+say."
+
+"I don't see what good that would do," said Jimmieboy, a little
+surprised at the major's words. "What's the use of your saying anything,
+if I am not to pay any attention to you?"
+
+"I'll tell you if you'll sit down a moment," was the major's reply, upon
+which he and Jimmieboy sat down on a log at the road-side.
+
+The major then recited his story as follows:
+
+    "THE MAJOR'S MISFORTUNE.
+
+     When I was born, some years ago,
+       The world was standing upside down;
+     Pekin was off in Mexico,
+       And Paris stood near Germantown.
+
+     The moon likewise was out of gear.
+       And shone most brilliantly by day;
+     The while the sun did not appear
+       Until the moon had gone away.
+
+     Which was, you see, a very strange,
+       Unhappy way of doing things,
+     And people did not like the change,
+       Save clods who took the rank of kings.
+
+     For kings as well were going wrong,
+       And 'stead of crowns wore beaver hats,
+     While those once mean and poor grew strong;
+       The dogs e'en ran from mice and rats.
+
+     The Frenchman spoke the Spanish tongue,
+       The Russian's words were Turkestan;
+     And England's nerves were all unstrung
+       By cockneys speaking Aryan.
+
+     Schools went to boys, and billie-goats
+       Drove children harnessed up to carts.
+     The rivers flowed up hill, and oats
+       Were fed to babies 'stead of tarts.
+
+     With things in this shape was I born.
+       The stars were topsy-turvy all,
+     And hence it is my fate forlorn
+       When things are short to call them tall;
+
+     When thing are black to call them white;
+       And if they're good to call them bad;
+     To say 'tis day when it is night;
+       To call an elephant a shad.
+
+     And when I say that this is this,
+       That it is that you'll surely know;
+     For truth's a thing I always miss,
+       And what I say is never so."
+
+"Poor fellow!" cried Jimmieboy. "How very unpleasant! Is that really a
+true story?"
+
+"No," returned the major, sadly. "It is not true."
+
+And then Jimmieboy knew that it was true, and he felt very sorry for the
+major.
+
+"Never mind, major," he said, tapping his companion affectionately on
+the shoulder. "I'll believe what you say if nobody else does."
+
+"Oh, don't, don't! I beg of you, don't!" cried the major, anxiously. "I
+wouldn't have you do that for all the world. If you did, it would get us
+into all sorts of trouble. If I had thought you'd do that, I'd never
+have told you the story."
+
+"Very well," said Jimmieboy, "then I won't. Only I should think you'd
+want to have somebody believe in you."
+
+"Oh, you can believe in me all you want," returned the major. "I'm one
+of the finest fellows in the world, and worthy of anybody's
+friendship--and if anybody ought to know, Jimmieboy, I'm the one, for I
+know myself intimately. I've known myself ever since I was a little bit
+of a boy, and I can tell you if there's any man in the world who has a
+noble character and a good conscience and a heart in the right place,
+I'm him. It's only what I say you mustn't believe in. Remember that, and
+we shall be all right."
+
+"All right," said Jimmieboy. "We'll do it that way. Now tell me what you
+don't know about finding preserved cherries and pickled peaches. We've
+got to lay in a very large supply of them, and I haven't the first idea
+how to get 'em."
+
+"H'm! What I don't know about 'em would take a long time to tell,"
+returned the major, with a shake of his head, "because there's so much
+of it. In the first place,
+
+        "I do not know
+         If cherries grow
+     On trees, or roofs, or rocks;
+         Or if they come
+         In cans--ho-hum!--
+     Or packed up in a box.
+
+         Mayhap you'll find
+         The proper kind
+     Down where they sell red paint;
+         And then, you see,
+         Oh, dear! Ah, me!
+     And then again you mayn't."
+
+"That appears to settle the cherries," said Jimmieboy, somewhat
+impatiently, for it did seem to him that the major was wasting a great
+deal of valuable time.
+
+"Oh, dear me, no!" ejaculated the major. "I could go on like that
+forever about cherries. For instance:
+
+        "You might perchance
+         Get some in France,
+     And some in Germany;
+         A crate or two
+         In far Barboo,
+     And some in Labradee."
+
+"Where's Labradee?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"It's Labrador," said the major, with a smile; "but Labradee rhymes
+better with Germany, and as long as you know I'm not telling the truth,
+and are not likely to go there, it doesn't make any difference if I
+change it a little."
+
+"That's so," said Jimmieboy, with a snicker. "But how about those
+peaches? Do you know anything that isn't so about them?"
+
+"Oh, yes, lots," said the major.
+
+    "I know that when the peach is green,
+       And growing on the tree,
+     It's harder than a common bean,
+       And yellow as can be.
+
+     I know that if you eat a peach
+       That's just a bit too young,
+     A lesson strong the act will teach,
+       And leave your nerves unstrung.
+
+     And, furthermore, I know this fact:
+       The crop, however hale
+     In every year before 'tis packed,
+       Doth never fail to fail."
+
+"That's very interesting," said Jimmieboy, when the major had recited
+these lines, "but it doesn't help me a bit. What I want to know is how
+the pickled peaches are to be found, and where."
+
+"Oh, that's it, is it?" said the major. "Well, it's easy enough to tell
+you that. First as to how you are to find them--this applies to
+huckleberries and daisies and fire-engines and everything else, just as
+well as it does to peaches, so you'd better listen. It's a very valuable
+thing to know.
+
+    "The way to find a pickled peach,
+       A cow, or piece of pumpkin pie,
+     A simple lesson is to teach,
+       As can be seen with half an eye.
+
+     Look up the road and down the road,
+       Look North and South and East and West.
+     Let not a single episode
+       Come in betwixt you and your quest.
+
+     Search morning, night, and afternoon,
+       From Monday until Saturday;
+     By light of sun and that of moon,
+       Nor mind the troubles in your way.
+
+     And keep this up until you get
+       The thing that you are looking for,
+     And then, of course, you need not fret
+       About the matter any more."
+
+"You are a great help," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Don't mention it, my dear boy," replied the major, so pleased that he
+smiled and cracked some of the red enamel on his lips. "I like to be
+useful. It's almost as good as being youthful. In fact, to people who
+lisp and pronounce their esses as though they were teeaitches, it's
+quite the same. It was very easy to tell you how to find a pickled
+peach, but it's much harder to tell you where. In fact, I don't know
+that I can tell you where, but if I were not compelled to ignore the
+truth I should inform you at once that I haven't the slightest idea.
+But, of course, I can tell you where you might find them if they were
+there--which, of course, they aren't. For instance:
+
+    "Pickled peaches might be found
+     In the gold mines underground;
+
+     Pickled peaches might be seen
+     Rolling down the Bowling Green;
+
+     Pickled peaches might spring up
+     In a bed of custard cup;
+
+     Pickled peaches might sprout forth
+     From an ice-cake in the North;
+
+     I have seen them in the South
+     In a pickaninny's mouth;
+
+     I have seen them in the West
+     Hid inside a cowboy's vest;
+
+     I have seen them in the East
+     At a small boy's birthday feast;
+
+     Maybe, too, a few you'd see
+     In the land of the Chinee;
+
+     And this statement broad I'll dare:
+     You might find them anywhere."
+
+"Thank you," said Jimmieboy. "I feel easier now that I know all this. I
+don't know what I should have done if I hadn't met you, major."
+
+"It's very unkind of you to say so," said the major, very much pleased
+by Jimmieboy's appreciation. "Of course you know what I mean."
+
+"Yes," answered Jimmieboy, "I do. Now I'll tell you what I think. I
+think pickled peaches come in cans and bottles."
+
+        "Bottles and cans,
+         Bottles and cans,
+     When a man marries it ruins his plans,"
+
+quoted the major. "I got married once," he added, "but I became a
+bachelor again right off. My wife wrote better poetry than I could, and
+I couldn't stand that, you know. That's how I came to be a soldier."
+
+"That hasn't anything to do with the pickled peaches," said Jimmieboy,
+impatiently. "Now, unless I am very much mistaken, we can go to the
+grocery store and buy a few bottles."
+
+"Ho!" jeered the major. "What's the use of buying bottles when you're
+after pickled peaches?
+
+    'Of all the futile, futile things--
+       Remarked the Apogee--
+     That is as truly futilest
+       As futilest can be.'
+
+You never heard my poem on the Apogee, did you, Jimmieboy?"
+
+"No. I never even heard of an Apogee. What is an Apogee, anyhow?" asked
+the boy.
+
+"To give definitions isn't a part of my bargain," answered the major. "I
+haven't the slightest idea what an Apogee is. He may be a bird with a
+whole file of unpaid bills, for all I know, but I wrote a poem about him
+once that made another poet so jealous that he purposely caught a bad
+cold and sneezed his head off; and I don't blame him either, because it
+was a magnificent thing in its way. I'll tell it to you. Listen:
+
+    "THE APOGEE.
+
+     The Apogee wept saline tears
+       Into the saline sea,
+     To overhear two mutineers
+       Discuss their pedigree.
+                       Said he:
+     Of all the futile, futile things
+       That ever I did see.
+     That is as truly futilest
+       As futilest can be.
+
+     He hied him thence to his hotel,
+       And there it made him ill
+     To hear a pretty damosel
+       A bass song try to trill.
+                       Said he:
+     Of all the futile, futile things--
+       To say it I am free--
+     That is about the futilest
+       That ever I did see.
+
+     He went from sea to mountain height,
+       And there he heard a lad
+     Of sixty-eight compare the sight
+       To other views he'd had;
+                       And he
+     Remarked: Of all the futile things
+       That ever came to me,
+     This is as futily futile
+       As futile well can be.
+
+     Then in disgust he went back home,
+       His door-bell rang all day,
+     But no one to the door did come:
+       The butler'd gone away.
+                      Said he:
+     This is the strangest, queerest world
+       That ever I did see.
+     It's two per cent. of earth, and nine-
+       Ty-eight futility."
+
+"Isn't that elegant?" added the major, when he had finished.
+
+"It sounds well," said Jimmieboy. "But what does it mean? What's
+futile?"
+
+"Futile? What does futile mean?" said the major, slowly. "Why,
+it's--it's a word, you know, and sort of stands for 'what's the use.'"
+
+"Oh," replied Jimmieboy. "I see. To be futile means that you are wasting
+time, eh?"
+
+"That's it," said the major. "I'm glad you said it and not I, because
+that makes it true. If I'd said it, it wouldn't have been so."
+
+"Well, all I've got to say," said Jimmieboy, "is that if anybody ever
+came to me and asked me where he could find a futile person, I'd send
+him over to you. Here we've wasted nearly the whole afternoon and we
+haven't got a single thing. We haven't even talked of anything but
+peaches and cherries, and we've got to get jam and sugar and almonds
+yet."
+
+Here the major smiled.
+
+"It isn't any laughing matter," said Jimmieboy. "It's a very serious
+piece of business, in fact. Here's this Parawelopipedon going around
+ruining everything he can lay his claws on, and instead of helping me
+out of the fix I'm in, and starting the expedition off, you sit here and
+tell me about Apogees and other things I haven't time to hear about."
+
+"I was only smiling to show how sorry I was," said the major,
+apologetically.
+
+    "I always smile when I am sad,
+       And when I'm filled with glee
+     A solitary tear-drop trick-
+       Les down the cheek of me."
+
+"Oh, that's it," said Jimmieboy. "Well, let's stop fooling now and get
+those supplies."
+
+"All right," assented the major. "Where are the soldiers who accompanied
+you? We'll give 'em their orders, and you'll have the supplies in no
+time."
+
+"How's that?" queried Jimmieboy.
+
+"Why, don't you see," said the major, "that's the nice thing about being
+a general. If you have to do something you don't know how to do, you
+command your men to go and do it. That lifts the responsibility from
+your shoulders to theirs. They don't dare disobey, and there you are."
+
+"Good enough!" cried Jimmieboy, delighted to find so easy a way out of
+his troubles. "I'll give them their orders at once. I'll tell them to
+get the supplies. Will they surely do it?"
+
+"They'll have to, or be put in the guard-house," returned the major.
+"And they don't like that, you know, because the guard-house hasn't any
+walls, and it's awfully draughty. But, as I said before, where are the
+soldiers?"
+
+"Why!" said Jimmieboy, starting up and looking anxiously about him.
+"They've gone, haven't they?"
+
+"They seem to have," said the major, putting his hand over his eyes and
+gazing up and down the road, upon which no sign of Jimmieboy's command
+was visible. "You ordered them to halt when you sat down here, didn't
+you?"
+
+"No," said Jimmieboy, "I didn't."
+
+"Then that accounts for it," returned the major, with a scornful glance
+at Jimmieboy. "They've gone on. They couldn't halt without orders, and
+they must be eight miles from here by this time."
+
+"What'll happen?" asked the boy, anxiously.
+
+"What'll happen?" echoed the major. "Why, they'll march on forever
+unless you get word to them to halt. You are a gay general, you are."
+
+"But what's to be done?" asked Jimmieboy, growing tearful.
+
+"There are only two things you can do. The earth is round, and in a few
+years they'll pass this way again, and then you can tell them to stop.
+That's one thing you can do. The second is to despatch me on horseback
+to overtake and tell them to keep right on. They'll know what you mean,
+and they'll halt and wait until you come up."
+
+"That's the best plan," cried Jimmieboy, with a sigh of relief. "You
+hurry ahead and make them wait for me, and I'll come along as fast as I
+can."
+
+So the major mounted his horse and galloped away, leaving Jimmieboy
+alone in the road, trudging manfully ahead as fast as his small legs
+could carry him.
+
+[Illustration: THE PARALLELOPIPEDON AND THE MIRROR. PAGE 54.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+JIMMIEBOY MEETS THE ENEMY.
+
+
+As the noise made by the clattering hoofs of Major Blueface's horse grew
+fainter and fainter, and finally died away entirely in the distance,
+Jimmieboy was a little startled to hear something that sounded very like
+a hiss in the trees behind him. At first he thought it was the light
+breeze blowing through the branches, making the leaves rustle, but when
+it was repeated he stopped short in the road and glanced backward,
+grasping his sword as he did so.
+
+"Hello there!" he cried. "Who are you, and what do you want?"
+
+"Sh-sh-sh!" answered the mysterious something. "Don't talk so loud,
+general, the major may come back."
+
+"What if he does?" said Jimmieboy. "I rather think I wish he would. I
+don't know whether or not I'm big enough not to be afraid of you. Can't
+you come out of the bushes and let me see you?"
+
+"Not unless the major is out of sight," was the answer. "I can't stand
+the major; but you needn't be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt you for all
+the world. I'm the enemy."
+
+"The what?" cried Jimmieboy, aghast.
+
+"I'm the enemy," replied the invisible object. "That's what I call
+myself when I'm with sensible people. Other people have a long name for
+me that I never could pronounce or spell. I'm the animal that got away."
+
+"Not the Parallelopipedon?" said Jimmieboy.
+
+"That's it! That's the name I can't pronounce," said the invisible
+animal. "I'm the Parallelandsoforth, and I've been trying to have an
+interview with you ever since I heard they'd made you general. The fact
+is, Jimmieboy, I am very anxious that you should succeed in capturing
+me, because I don't like it out here very much. The fences are the
+toughest eating I ever had, and I actually sprained my wisdom-tooth at
+breakfast this morning trying to bite a brown stone ball off the top of
+a gate post."
+
+"But if you feel that way," said Jimmieboy, somewhat surprised at this
+unusual occurrence, "why don't you surrender?"
+
+"Me?" cried the Parallelopipedon. "A Parallelandsoforth of my standing
+surrender right on the eve of a battle that means all the sweetmeats I
+can eat, and more too? I guess not."
+
+"I wish I could see you," said Jimmieboy, earnestly. "I don't like
+standing here talking to a wee little voice with nothing to him. Why
+don't you come out here where I can see you?"
+
+"It's for your good, Jimmieboy; that's why I stay in here. I am an awful
+spectacle. Why, it puts me all in a tremble just to look at myself; and
+if it affects me that way, just think how it would be with you."
+
+"I wouldn't be afraid," said Jimmieboy, bravely.
+
+"Yes, you would too," answered the Parallelopipedon. "You'd be so scared
+you couldn't run, I am so ugly. Didn't the major tell you that story
+about my reflection in the looking-glass?"
+
+"No," answered Jimmieboy. "He didn't say anything about it."
+
+"That's queer. The story is in rhyme, and the major always tells
+everybody all the poetry he knows," said the invisible enemy. "That's
+why I never go near him. He has only enough to last one year, and the
+second year he tells it all over again. I'm surprised he never told you
+about my reflection in the mirror, because it is one of his worst, and
+he always likes them better than the others."
+
+"I'll ask him to tell it to me next time I see him," said Jimmieboy,
+"unless you'll tell it to me now."
+
+"I'd just as lief tell you," said the Parallelopipedon. "Only you
+mustn't laugh or cry, because you haven't time to laugh, and generals
+never cry. This is the way it goes:
+
+    "THE PARALLELOPIPEDON AND THE MIRROR.
+
+     The Parallelopipedon so very ugly is,
+     His own heart fills with terror when he looks upon his phiz.
+     That's why he wears blue goggles--twenty pairs upon his nose,
+     And never dares to show himself, no matter where he goes.
+
+     One day when he was walking down a crowded village street,
+     He looked into a little shop where stood a mirror neat.
+     He saw his own reflection there as plain as plain could be;
+     And said, 'I'd give four dollars if that really wasn't me.'
+
+     And, strange to say, the figure in the mirror's silver face
+     Was also filled with terror at the other's lack of grace;
+     And this reflection trembled till it strangely came to pass
+    The handsome mirror shivered to ten thousand bits of glass.
+
+     To this tale there's a moral, and that moral briefly is:
+     If you perchance are burdened with a terrifying phiz,
+     Don't look into your mirror--'tis a fearful risk to take--
+     'Tis certain sure to happen that the mirror it will break."
+
+"Well, if that's so, I guess I don't want to see you," said Jimmieboy.
+"I only like pretty things. But tell me; if all this is true, how did
+the major come to say it? I thought he couldn't tell the truth."
+
+"That's only as a rule. Rules have exceptions. For instance," explained
+the Parallelopipedon, "as a rule I can't pronounce my name, but in
+reciting that poem to you I did speak my name in the very first
+line--but if you only knew how it hurt me to do it! Oh dear me, how it
+hurt! Did you ever have a tooth pulled?"
+
+"Once," said Jimmieboy, wincing at the remembrance of his painful
+experience.
+
+"Well, pronouncing my name is to me worse than having all my teeth
+pulled and then put back again, and except when I get hold of a fine
+general like you I never make the sacrifice," said the Parallelopipedon.
+"But tell me, Jimmieboy, you are out after preserved cherries and
+pickled peaches, I understand?"
+
+"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "And powdered sugar, almonds, jam, and several
+other things that are large and elegant."
+
+"Well, just let me tell you one thing," said the Parallelopipedon,
+confidentially. "I'm so sick of cherries and peaches that I run every
+time I see them, and when I run there is no tin soldier or general of
+your size in the world that can catch me. Now what are we here for? I am
+here to be captured; you are here to capture me. To accomplish our
+various purposes we've got to begin right, and you might as well
+understand now as at any other time that you are beginning wrong."
+
+"I don't know what else to do," said Jimmieboy. "I'm obeying orders. The
+colonel told me to get those things, and I supposed I ought to get 'em."
+
+"It doesn't pay to suppose," said the Parallelopipedon. "Many a victory
+has been lost by a supposition. As that old idiot Major Blueface said
+once, when he tried to tell an untruth, and so hit the truth by mistake:
+
+    'Success always comes to
+       The mortal who knows,
+     And never to him who
+       Does naught but suppose.
+
+     For knowledge is certain,
+       While hypothesees
+     Oft drop defeat's curtain
+       On great victories.'"
+
+"What are hypothesees?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"They are ifs in words of four syllables," said the Parallelopipedon,
+"and you want to steer clear of them as much as you can."
+
+"I'll try to," said Jimmieboy. "But how am I to get knowledge instead of
+hypotheseeses? I have to take what people tell me. I don't know
+everything."
+
+"Well, that's only natural," said the Parallelopipedon, kindly. "There
+are only two creatures about here that do know everything. They--between
+you and me--are me and myself. The others you meet here don't even begin
+to know everything, though they'll try to make you believe they do. Now
+I dare say that tin colonel of yours would try to make you believe that
+water is wet, and that fire is hot, and other things like that. Well,
+they are, but he doesn't know it. He only thinks it. He has put his hand
+into a pail of water and found out that it was wet, but he doesn't know
+why it is wet any more than he knows why fire is hot."
+
+"Do you?" queried Jimmieboy.
+
+"Certainly," returned the Parallelopipedon. "Water is wet because it is
+water, and fire is hot because it wouldn't be fire if it wasn't hot. Oh,
+it takes brains to know everything, Jimmieboy, and if there's one thing
+old Colonel Zinc hasn't got, it's brains. If you don't believe it, cut
+his head off some day and see for yourself. You won't find a whole brain
+in his head."
+
+"It must be nice to know everything," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"It's pretty nice," said the Parallelopipedon, cautiously. "But it's not
+always the nicest thing in the world. If you are off on a long journey,
+for instance, it's awfully hard work to carry all you know along with
+you. It has given me a headache many a time, I can tell you. Sometimes I
+wish I did like your papa, and kept all I know in books instead of in my
+head. It's a great deal better to do things that way; then, when you go
+travelling, and have to take what you know along with you, you can just
+pack it up in a trunk and make the railroad people carry it."
+
+"Do you know what's going to happen to-morrow and the next day?" asked
+Jimmieboy, gazing in rapt admiration at the spot whence the voice
+proceeded.
+
+"Yes, indeed. That's just where the great trouble comes in," answered
+the Parallelopipedon. "It isn't so much bother to know what has
+been--what everybody knows--but when you have to store up in your mind
+thousands and millions of things that aren't so now, but have got to be
+so some day, it's positively awful. Why, Jimmieboy," he said,
+impressively, "you'd be terrified if I told you what is going to be
+known by the time you go to school; it's awful to think of all the
+things you will have to learn then that aren't things yet, but are going
+to be within a year or two. I'm real sorry for the little boys who will
+live a hundred years from now, when I think of all the history they will
+have to learn when they go to school--history that isn't made yet. Just
+take the Presidents of the United States, for instance. In George
+Washington's time it didn't take a boy five seconds to learn the list of
+Presidents; but think of that list to-day! Why, there are twenty-five
+names on it now, and more to come. It gets harder every year. Now I--I
+know the names of all the Presidents there's ever going to be, and it
+would take me just eighteen million nine hundred and sixty-seven years,
+eleven months and twenty-six days, four hours and twenty-eight minutes
+to tell you all of them, and even then I wouldn't be half through."
+
+"Why, it's terrible," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes, indeed it is," returned the Parallelopipedon. "You ought to be
+glad you are a little boy now instead of having to wait until then. The
+boys of the year 19,605,726,422 are going to have the hardest time in
+the world learning things, and I don't believe they'll get through
+going to school much before they're ninety years old."
+
+"I guess the colonel is glad he doesn't know all that," said Jimmieboy,
+"if it's so hard to carry it around with you."
+
+"Indeed he ought to be, if he isn't," ejaculated the Parallelopipedon.
+"There's no two ways about it; if he had the weight of one half of what
+I know on his shoulders, it would bend him in two and squash him into a
+piece of tin-foil."
+
+"Say," said Jimmieboy, after a moment's pause. "I heard my papa say he
+thought I might be President of the United States some day. If you know
+all the names of the Presidents that are to come, tell me, will I be?"
+
+"I don't remember any name like Jimmieboy on the list," said the
+Parallelopipedon; "but that doesn't prove anything. You might get
+elected on your last name. But don't let's talk about that--that's
+politics, and I don't like politics. What I want to know is, do you
+really want to capture me?"
+
+"Yes, I do," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Then you'd better give up trying to get the peaches and cherries," said
+the Parallelopipedon, firmly. "I won't have 'em. You can shoot 'em at me
+at the rate of a can a minute for ninety-seven years, and I'll never
+surrender. I hate 'em."
+
+"But what am I to do, then?" queried the little general. "What must I do
+to capture you?"
+
+"Get something in the place of the cherries and peaches that I like,
+that's all. Very simple matter, that."
+
+"But I don't know what you like," said Jimmieboy. "I never took lunch
+with you."
+
+"No--and you never will," answered the Parallelopipedon. "And for a very
+good reason. I never eat lunch, breakfast, tea, or supper. I never eat
+anything but dinner, and I eat that four times a day."
+
+Jimmieboy laughed, half with mirth at the oddity of the
+Parallelopipedon's habit of eating, and half with the pleasure it gave
+him to think of what a delectable habit it was. Four dinners a day
+seemed to him to be the height of bliss, and he almost wished he too
+were a Parallelopipedon, that he might enjoy the same privilege.
+
+"Don't you ever eat between meals?" he asked, after a minute of silence.
+
+"Never," said the Parallelopipedon. "Never. There isn't time for it in
+the first place, and in the second there's never anything left between
+meals for me to eat. But if you had ever dined with me you'd know
+mighty well what I like, for I always have the same thing at every
+single dinner--two platefuls of each thing. It's a fine plan, that of
+having the same dishes at every dinner, day after day. Your stomach
+always knows what to expect, and is ready for it, so you don't get
+cholera morbus. If you want me to, I'll tell you what I always have, and
+what you must get me before you can coax me back."
+
+"Thank you," said Jimmieboy. "I'll be very much obliged."
+
+And then the Parallelopipedon recited the following delicious bill of
+fare for the young general.
+
+    "THE PARALLELOPIPEDON'S DINNER.
+
+     First bring on a spring mock-turtle
+       Stuffed with chestnuts roasted through,
+     Served in gravy; then a fertile
+       Steaming bowl of oyster stew.
+
+     Then about six dozen tartlets
+       Full of huckleberry jam,
+     Edges trimmed with juicy Bartletts--
+       Pears, these latter--then some ham.
+
+     Follow these with cauliflower,
+       Soaked in maple syrup sweet;
+     Then an apple large and sour,
+       And a rich red rosy beet.
+
+     Then eight quarts of cream--vanilla
+       Is the flavor I like best--
+     Acts sublimely as a chiller,
+       Gives your fevered system rest.
+
+     After this a pint of coffee,
+       Forty jars of marmalade,
+     And a pound of peanut toffee,
+       Then a pumpkin pie--home-made.
+
+     Top this off with pickled salmon,
+       Cold roast beef, and eat it four
+     Times each day, and ghastly famine
+       Ne'er will enter at your door."
+
+"H'm! h'm! h'm!" cried Jimmieboy, dancing up and down, and clapping his
+hands with delight at the very thought of such a meal. "Do you mean to
+say that you eat that four times a day?"
+
+"Yes," said the Parallelopipedon, "I do. In fact, general, it is that
+that has made me what I am. I was originally a Parallelogram, and I ate
+that four times a day, and it kept doubling me up until I became six
+Parallelograms as I am to-day. Get me those things--enough of them to
+enable me to have 'em five times a day, and I surrender. Without them, I
+go on and stay escaped forever, and the longer I stay escaped, the worse
+it will be for these people who live about here, for I shall devastate
+the country. I shall chew up all the mowing-machines in Pictureland.
+I'll bite the smoke-stack off every railway engine I encounter, and
+throw it into the smoking car, where it really belongs. I'll drink all
+the water in the wells. I'll pull up all the cellars by the roots; I may
+even go so far as to run down into your nursery, and gnaw into the wire
+that holds this picture country upon the wall, and let it drop into the
+water pitcher. But, oh dear, there's the major coming down the road!" he
+added, in a tone of alarm. "I must go, or he'll insist on telling me a
+poem. But remember what I say, my boy, and beware! I'll do all I
+threaten to do if you don't do what I tell you. Good-by!"
+
+There was a slight rustling among the leaves, and the Parallelopipedon's
+voice died away as Major Blueface came galloping up astride of his
+panting, lather-covered steed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE MAJOR RETURNS.
+
+
+"Well," said Jimmieboy, as the major dismounted, "did you catch up with
+them?"
+
+"No, I didn't," returned the major, evidently much excited. "I should
+have caught them but for a dreadful encounter I had up the road, for
+between you and me, Jimmieboy, I have had a terrible adventure since I
+saw you last, and the soldiers I went to order back have been destroyed
+to the very last man."
+
+"Dear me!" cried Jimmieboy. "I am glad I didn't go with you. What
+happened?"
+
+"I was attacked about four miles up the road by a tremendous sixty-pound
+Quandary, and I was nearly killed," said the major. "The soldiers had
+only got four and a half miles on their way, and hearing the disturbance
+and my cries for help they hastened to the rescue, and were simply
+an-ni-hi-lated, which is old English for all mashed to pieces."
+
+"But how did you escape?" said the boy.
+
+"Oh, I had a way, and it worked, that's all. I'm the safest soldier in
+the world, I am. You can capture me eight times a day, but I am always
+sure to escape," said the major, proudly. "But, my dear general, how is
+it that you do not tremble? Are you not aware that under the
+circumstances you ought to be a badly frightened warrior?"
+
+"I don't tremble, because I don't know whether you are telling the truth
+or not," said Jimmieboy. "Besides, I never saw a Quandary, and so I
+can't tell how terrible he is. Is he dreadful?"
+
+"He's more than dreadful," returned the major. "No word of two syllables
+expresses his dreadfulness. He is simply calamitous; and if there was a
+longer word in the dictionary applying to his case I'd use it, if it
+took all my front teeth out to say it."
+
+"That's all very well," said Jimmieboy, "but you can't make me shiver
+with fear by saying he's calamitous. What does he do? Bite?"
+
+"Bite? Well, I guess not," answered the major, scornfully. "He doesn't
+need to bite. Would you bite an apple if you could swallow it whole?"
+
+"I think I would," said Jimmieboy. "How would I get the juice of it if I
+didn't?"
+
+"You'd get just as much juice whether you bit it or not," snapped the
+major, who did not at all like Jimmieboy's coolness under the
+circumstances. "The Quandary doesn't bite anything, because his mouth is
+so large there isn't anything he can bite. He just takes you as you
+stand, gives a great gulp, and there you are."
+
+"Where?" queried Jimmieboy, who could not quite follow the major.
+
+"Wherever you happen to be, of course," said the major, gruffly. "You
+aren't a very sharp general, it seems to me. You don't seem to be able
+to see through a hole with a millstone in it. I have to explain
+everything to you just as if you were a baby or a school-teacher, but I
+can just tell you that if you ever were attacked by a Quandary you
+wouldn't like it much, and if he ever swallowed you you'd be a mighty
+lonesome general for a little while. You'd be a regular land Jonah."
+
+"Don't get mad at me, major," said Jimmieboy, clapping his companion on
+the back. "I'll be frightened if you want me to. Br-rr-rrr-rrr-rrrrr!
+There, is that the kind of a tremble you want me to have?"
+
+"Thank you, yes," the major replied, his face clearing and his smile
+returning. "I am very much obliged; and now to show you that you haven't
+made any mistake in getting frightened, I'll tell you what a Quandary
+is, and what he has done, and how I managed to escape; and as poetry is
+the easiest method for me to express my thoughts with, I'll put it all
+in rhyme.
+
+    "THE QUANDARY.
+
+     He is a fearful animal,
+       That quaint old Quandary--
+     A cousin of the tragical
+     And whimsically magical
+       Dilemma-bird is he.
+
+     He has an eye that's wonderful--
+       'Tis like a public school:
+     It has a thousand dutiful,
+     Though scarcely any beautiful,
+       Small pupils 'neath its rule.
+
+     And every pupil--marvelous
+       Indeed, sir, to relate--
+     When man becomes contiguous,
+     Makes certainty ambiguous--
+       Which is unfortunate.
+
+     For when this ambiguity
+       Has seized upon his prize,
+     Whate'er man tries, to do it he
+     Will find when he is through it, he
+       Had best done otherwise.
+
+     And hence it is this animal,
+       Of which I sing my song,
+     This creature reprehensible,
+     Is held by persons sensible
+       Responsible for wrong.
+
+     So if a friend or foe you see
+       Departing from his aim,
+     Be full, I pray, of charity--
+     He may have met the Quandary,
+       And so is not to blame."
+
+"That is very pretty," said Jimmieboy, as the major finished; "but, do
+you know, major, I don't understand one word of it."
+
+Much to Jimmieboy's surprise the major was pleased at this remark.
+
+"Thank you, Jimmieboy," he said. "That proves that I am a true poet. I
+think there's some meaning in those lines, but it's so long since I
+wrote them that I have forgotten exactly what I did mean, and it's that
+very thing that makes a poem out of the verses. Poetry is nothing but
+riddles in rhyme. You have to guess what is meant by the lines, and the
+harder that is, the greater the poem."
+
+"But I don't see much use of it," said Jimmieboy. "Riddles are fun
+sometimes, but poetry isn't."
+
+"That's very true," said the major. "But poetry has its uses. If it
+wasn't for poetry, the poets couldn't make a living, or if they did,
+they'd have to go into some other business, and most other businesses
+are crowded as it is."
+
+"Do people ever make a living writing poetry?" Jimmieboy asked.
+
+"Once in a while. I knew a man once who did. He called himself the
+Grocer-Poet, because he was a grocer in the day-time and a poet at
+night. He sold every poem he wrote, too," said the major.
+
+"To a newspaper?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"Oh, no," said the major. "He bought 'em from himself. When he'd wake up
+in the morning as a grocer he'd read what he had written the night
+before as a poet, and then he'd buy the verses from himself and throw
+them into the fire. But to return to the Quandary. He has awfully bad
+manners. He stares you right in the face whenever he meets you, and no
+matter what you want to do he tries to force you to do the other thing.
+The only way to escape him is not to do anything, but go back where you
+started from, and begin all over again."
+
+"Where did you meet him?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"Where? Why, where he's always met, of course, at a fork in the road.
+That's where he gets in his fine work," said the major. "Suppose, for
+instance, you were out for a stroll, and you thought you'd like to
+go--well, say to Calcutta. You stroll along, and you stroll along, and
+you stroll along. Then you come to a place where the road splits, one
+half going to the right and one to the left, or, if you don't like right
+and left, we'll say one going to Calcutta by way of Cape Horn, and the
+other going to Calcutta by way of Greenland's icy mountains."
+
+"It's a long walk either way," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes. It's a walk that isn't often taken," assented the major, with a
+knowing shake of the head. "But at the fork of this road the Quandary
+attacks you. He stops you and says, 'Which way are you going to
+Calcutta?' and you say, 'Well, as it is a warm day, I think I'll go by
+way of Greenland's icy mountains.' 'No,' says the Quandary, 'you won't
+do any such thing, because it may snow. You'd better go the other way.'
+'Very well,' say you, 'I'll go the other way, then.' 'Why do you do
+that?' queries the Quandary. 'If it should grow very warm you'd be
+roasted to death.' 'Then I don't know what to do,' say you. 'What is the
+matter with going both ways?' says the Quandary, to which you reply,
+'How can I do that?' 'Try it and see,' he answers. Then," continued the
+major, his voice sinking to a whisper--"then you do try it and you do
+see, unless you are a wise, sagacious, sapient, perspicacious, astute,
+canny, penetrating, needle-witted, learned man of wisdom like myself who
+knows a thing or two. In that case you don't try, for you can see
+without trying that any man with two legs who tries to walk along two
+roads leading in different directions at once is just going to split
+into at least two halves before he has gone twenty miles, and that is
+just what the Quandary wants you to do, for it's over such horrible
+spectacles as a man divided against himself that he gloats, and when he
+is through gloating he swallows what's left."
+
+"And what does the wise, sagacious, sappy, perspiring man of wisdom like
+yourself who knows a thing or two do?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"I didn't say sappy or perspiring," retorted the major. "I said sapient
+and perspicacious."
+
+"Well, anyhow, what does he do?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"He gives up going to Calcutta," observed the major.
+
+"Oh, I see. To gain a victory over the Quandary you turn and run away?"
+asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes, that's it. That's what saved me. I cried for help, turned about,
+and ran back here, and I can tell you it takes a brave man to turn his
+back on an enemy," said the major.
+
+"And why didn't the soldiers do it too?" queried Jimmieboy.
+
+"There wasn't anybody to order a retreat, so when the Quandary attacked
+them they marched right on, single file, and every one of 'em split in
+two, fell in a heap, and died."
+
+"But I should think you would have ordered them to halt," insisted
+Jimmieboy.
+
+"I had no power to do so," the major replied. "If I had only had the
+power, I might have saved their lives by ordering them to march two by
+two instead of single file, and then when they met the Quandary they
+could have gone right ahead, the left-hand men taking the left-hand
+road, the right-hand men the right, but of course I only had orders to
+tell them to come back here, and a soldier can only obey his orders. It
+was awful the way those noble lives were sacrifi--"
+
+Here Jimmieboy started to his feet with a cry of alarm. There were
+unmistakable sounds of approaching footsteps.
+
+"Somebody or something is coming," he cried.
+
+"Oh, no, I guess not," said the major, getting red in the face, for he
+recognized, as Jimmieboy did not, the firm, steady tread of the
+returning soldiers whom he had told Jimmieboy the Quandary had
+annihilated. "It's only the drum of your ear you hear," he added. "You
+know you have a drum in your ear, and every once in a while it begins
+its rub-a-dub-dub just like any other drum. Oh, no, you don't hear
+anybody coming. Let's take a walk into the forest here and see if we
+can't find a few pipe plants. I think I'd like to have a smoke."
+
+"Why, you naughty major!" cried Jimmieboy, shaking his arm, which his
+companion had taken, free from the major's grasp. "You've been telling
+me a great big fib, because there are the soldiers coming back again."
+
+"What!" ejaculated the major, in well-affected surprise. "Well, I
+declare! So they are. Dear me! Why, do you know, general, that is the
+most marvelous cure I ever saw in my life. To think that all those men
+whom I saw not an hour ago lying dead on the field of battle, all ready
+for the Quandary's luncheon, should have been resusitated in so short a
+time, as--"
+
+"Halt!" roared Jimmieboy, interrupting the major in a most
+unceremonious fashion, for the soldiers by this time had reached a point
+in the road directly opposite where he was sitting.
+
+The soldiers halted.
+
+"Break ranks!" cried Jimmieboy, after the corporal had told him the
+proper order to give next.
+
+The soldiers broke ranks, and in sheer weariness threw themselves down
+on the soft turf at the side of the road--all except the corporal, who
+at Jimmieboy's request came and sat down at the general's side to make
+his report.
+
+"This is fine weather we are having, corporal," said the major, winking
+at the subordinate officer, and trying to make him understand that the
+less he said about the major the better it would be for all concerned.
+
+"Yes," returned the corporal. "Better for sleeping than for military
+duty, eh, major?"
+
+Here the major grew pale, but had the presence of mind to remark that he
+thought it might rain in time for tea.
+
+"There's something behind all this," thought Jimmieboy; "and I'm going
+to know what it all means."
+
+Then he said aloud, "You have had a very speedy recovery, corporal."
+
+Here the major cleared his throat more loudly than usual, blushed rosy
+red, and winked twice as violently at the corporal as before.
+
+"Did you ever hear my poem on the 'Cold Tea River in China'?" he asked.
+
+"No," said the corporal, "I never did, and I never want to."
+
+"Then I will recite it for you," said the major.
+
+"After the corporal has made his report, major," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"It goes this way," continued the major, pretending not to hear.
+
+    "Some years ago--'way back in '69--a
+     Friend and I went for a trip through China,
+     That pleasant land where rules King Tommy Chang,
+     Where flows the silver river Yangtse-Wang--
+       Through fertile fields, through sweetest-scented bowers
+       Of creeping vinous vines and floral flowers."
+
+"My dear major," interrupted Jimmieboy, "I do not want to hurt your
+feelings, but much as I like to hear your poetry I must listen to the
+report of the corporal first."
+
+"Oh, very well," returned the major, observing that the corporal had
+taken to his heels as soon as he had begun to recite. "Very well. Let
+the corporal proceed."
+
+Jimmieboy then saw for the first time that the corporal had fled.
+
+"Why, where is he?" he asked.
+
+"I do not know," returned the major, coldly. "I fancy he has gone to the
+kitchen to cook his report. He always goes off when I recite."
+
+"Oh, well, never mind," said Jimmieboy, noticing that the major was
+evidently very much hurt. "Go on with the poem about 'Cold Tea River.'"
+
+"No, I shall not," replied the major. "I shall not do it for two
+reasons, general, unless you as my superior officer command me to do it,
+and I hope you will not. In the first place, you have publicly
+humiliated me in the presence of a tin corporal, an inferior in rank,
+and consequently have hurt my feelings more deeply than you imagine. I
+am not tall, sir, but my feelings are deep enough to be injured most
+deeply, and in view of that fact I prefer to say nothing more about that
+poem. The other reason is that there is really no such poem, because
+there is really no such a stream as Cold Tea River in China, though
+there might have been had Nature been as poetic and fanciful as I, for
+it is as easy to conceive of a river having its source in the land of
+the tea-trees, and having its waters so full of the essence of tea
+gained from contact with the roots of those trees, that to all intents
+and purposes it is a river of tea. Had you permitted me to go on
+uninterrupted I should have made up a poem on that subject, and might
+possibly by this time have had it done, but as it is, it never will be
+composed. If you will permit me I will take a horseback ride and see if
+I cannot forget the trials of this memorable day. If I return I shall be
+back, but otherwise you may never see me again. I feel so badly over
+your treatment of me that I may be rash enough to commit suicide by
+jumping into a smelting-pot and being moulded over again into a piece of
+shot, and if I do, general, if I do, and if I ever get into battle and
+am fired out of a gun, I shall seek out that corporal, and use my best
+efforts to amputate his head off so quickly that he won't know what has
+happened till he tries to think, and finds he hasn't anything to do it
+with."
+
+Breathing which horrible threat, the major mounted his horse and
+galloped madly down the road, and Jimmieboy, not knowing whether to be
+sorry or amused, started on a search for the corporal in order that he
+might hear his report, and gain, if possible, some solution of the
+major's strange conduct.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE CORPORAL'S FAIRY STORY.
+
+
+Jimmieboy had not long to search for the corporal. He found that worthy
+in a very few minutes, lying fast asleep under a tree some twenty or
+thirty rods down the road, snoring away as if his life depended upon it.
+It was quite evident that the poor fellow was worn out with his
+exertions, and Jimmieboy respected his weariness, and restrained his
+strong impulse to awaken him.
+
+His consideration for the tired soldier was not without its reward, for
+as Jimmieboy listened the corporal's snores took semblance to words,
+which, as he remembered them, the snores of his papa in the early
+morning had never done. Indeed, Jimmieboy and his small brother Russ
+were agreed on the one point that their father's snores were about the
+most uninteresting, uncalled for, unmeaning sounds in the world, which,
+no doubt, was why they made it a point to interrupt them on every
+possible occasion. The novelty of the present situation was delightful
+to the little general. To be able to stand there and comprehend what it
+was the corporal was snoring so vociferously, was most pleasing, and he
+was still further entertained to note that it was nothing less than a
+rollicking song that was having its sweetness wasted upon the desert air
+by the sleeping officer before him.
+
+This is the song that Jimmieboy heard:
+
+    "I would not be a man of peace,
+         Oh, no-ho-ho--not I;
+     But give me battles without cease;
+     Give me grim war with no release,
+         Or let me die-hi-hi.
+
+     I love the frightful things we eat
+         In times of war-or-or;
+     The biscuit tough, the granite meat,
+     And hard green apples are a treat
+         Which I adore-dor-dor.
+
+     I love the sound of roaring guns
+         Upon my e-e-ears,
+     I love in routs the lengthy runs,
+     I do not mind the stupid puns
+         Of dull-ull grenadiers.
+
+     I should not weep to lose a limb,
+         An arm, or thumb-bum-bum.
+     I laugh with glee to hear the zim
+     Of shells that make my chance seem slim
+         Of getting safe back hum.
+
+     Just let me sniff gunpowder in
+         My nasal fee-a-ture,
+     And I will ever sing and grin.
+     To me sweet music is the din
+         Of war, you may be sure."
+
+"Well, I declare!" cried Jimmieboy. "If my dear old papa could snore
+songs like that, wouldn't I let him sleep mornings!"
+
+"He does," snored the corporal. "The only trouble is he doesn't snore as
+clearly as I do. It takes long practice to become a fluent snorer like
+myself--that is to say, a snorer who can be understood by any one
+whatever his age, nation, or position in life. That song I have just
+snored for you could be understood by a Zulu just as well as you
+understood it, because a snore is exactly the same in Zuluese as it is
+in your language or any other--in which respect it resembles a cup of
+coffee or a canary-bird."
+
+"Are you still snoring, or is this English you are speaking?" asked
+Jimmieboy.
+
+"Snoring; and that proves just what I said, for you understood me just
+as plainly as though I had spoken in English," returned the corporal,
+his eyes still tightly closed in sleep.
+
+"Snore me another poem," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"No, I won't do that; but if you wish me to I'll snore you a fairy
+tale," answered the corporal.
+
+"That will be lovely," said Jimmieboy. "I love fairy tales."
+
+"Very well," observed the corporal, turning over on his back and
+throwing his head back into an uncomfortable position so that he could
+snore more loudly. "Here goes. Once upon a time there was a small boy
+named Tom whose parents were so poor and so honest that they could not
+afford to give him money enough to go to the circus when it came to
+town, which made him very wretched and unhappy, because all the other
+little boys who lived thereabouts were more fortunately situated, and
+had bought tickets for the very first performance. Tom cried all night
+and went about the town moaning all day, for he did want to see the
+elephant whose picture was on the fences that could hold itself up on
+its hind tail; the man who could toss five-hundred-pound cannon balls in
+the air and catch them on top of his head as they came down; the trick
+horse that could jump over a fence forty feet high without disturbing
+the two-year-old wonder Pattycake who sat in a rocking-chair on his
+back. As Tom very well said, these were things one had to see to
+believe, and now they were coming, and just because he could not get
+fifty cents he could not see them.
+
+"Then he thought, 'Here! why can't I go out into the world, and by hard
+work earn the fifty cents I so much need to take me through the doors of
+the circus tent into the presence of these marvelous creatures?'
+
+"And he went out and called upon a great lawyer and asked him if he did
+not want a partner in his business for a day, but the lawyer only
+laughed and told him to go to the doctor and ask him. So Tom went to the
+doctor, and the doctor said he did not want a partner, but he did want a
+boy to take medicines for him and tell him what they tasted like, and he
+promised Tom fifty cents if he would be that boy for a day, and Tom said
+he would try.
+
+"Then the doctor got out his medicine-chest and gave Tom twelve bottles
+of medicine, and told him to taste each one of them, and Tom tasted two
+of them, and decided that he would rather do without the circus than
+taste the rest, so the doctor bade him farewell, and Tom went to look
+for something else to do. As he walked disconsolately down the street
+and saw by the clock that it was nearly eleven o'clock, he made up his
+mind that he would think no more about the circus, but would go home and
+study arithmetic instead, the chance of his being able to earn the
+fifty cents seemed so very slight. So he turned back, and was about to
+go to his home, when he caught sight of another circus poster, which
+showed how the fiery, untamed giraffe caught cocoanuts in his mouth--the
+cocoanuts being fired out of a cannon set off by a clown who looked as
+if he could make a joke that would make an owl laugh. This was too much
+for Tom. He couldn't miss that without at least making one further
+effort to earn the money that would pay for his ticket.
+
+"So off he started again in search of profitable employment. He had not
+gone far when he came to a crockery shop, and on stopping to look in the
+large shop window at the beautiful dishes and graceful soup tureens that
+were to be seen there, he saw a sign on which was written in great
+golden letters 'BOY WANTED.' Now Tom could not read, but something told
+him that that sign was a good omen for him, so he went into the shop and
+asked if they had any work that a boy of his size could do.
+
+"'Yes,' said the owner of the shop. 'We want an errand-boy. Are you an
+errand-boy?'
+
+"Tom answered bravely that he thought he was, and the man said he would
+give him a trial anyhow, and sent him off on a sample errand, telling
+him that if he did that one properly, he would pay him fifty cents a
+day for as many days as he kept him, giving him a half holiday on all
+circus-days. Tom was delighted, and started off gleefully to perform
+the sample errand, which was to take a basketful of china plates to the
+house of a rich merchant who lived four miles back in the country.
+Bravely the little fellow plodded along until he came to the gate-way
+of the rich man's place, when so overcome was he with happiness at
+getting something to do that he could not wait to get the gate open,
+but leaped like a deer clear over the topmost pickets. But, alas! his
+very happiness was his ruin, for as he landed on the other side the
+china plates flew out of the basket in every direction, and falling on
+the hard gravel path were broken every one."
+
+"Dear me!" cried Jimmieboy, sympathetically. "Poor little Tom."
+
+         "Whereat the cow
+        Remarked, 'Pray how--
+     If what you say is true--
+         How should the child,
+         However mild,
+     Become so wildly blue?'"
+
+snored the corporal.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" asked Jimmieboy, very much surprised at
+the rhyme, which, so far as he could see, had nothing to do with the
+fairy story.
+
+"What's the matter with me?" returned the corporal. "Nothing. Why?"
+
+"There wasn't anything about a cow in the fairy story you were telling
+about Tom," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Was I telling that story about Tom?" asked the sleeping soldier.
+
+"Certainly," replied Jimmieboy.
+
+"Then you must have interrupted me," snored the corporal. "You must
+never interrupt a person who is snoring until he gets through, because
+the chances are nine out of ten that, being asleep, he won't remember
+what he has been snoring about, and will go off on something else
+entirely. Where was I when you interrupted?"
+
+"You had got to where Tom jumped over the gate and broke all the china
+plates," answered Jimmieboy.
+
+"Very well, then. I'll go on, but don't you say another thing until I
+have finished," said the corporal. Then resuming his story, he snored
+away as follows: "And falling on the hard gravel path the plates were
+broken every one, which was awfully sad, as any one could understand
+who could see how the poor little fellow threw himself down on the grass
+and wept. Dear me, how he wept! He wept so long and such great tears,
+that the grass about him for yards and yards looked as fresh and green
+as though there had been a rain-storm.
+
+"'Oh, dear! what shall I do?' cried Tom, ruefully regarding the
+shattered plates. 'They'll beat me if I go back to the shop, and I'll
+never get to see the circus after all.'
+
+"'No,' said a voice. 'They will not beat you, and I will see that you
+get to the circus.'
+
+"'Who are you?' asked Tom, looking up and seeing before him a beautiful
+lady, who looked as if she might be a part of the circus herself. 'Are
+you the lady with the iron jaw or the horseback lady that jumps through
+hoops of fire?'
+
+"'Neither,' replied the lady. 'I am your Fairy Godmother, and I have
+come to tell you that if you will gather up the broken plates and take
+them up to the great house yonder, I will fix it so that you can go to
+the circus.'
+
+"'Won't they scold me for breaking the plates?' asked Tom, his eyes
+brightening and his tears drying.
+
+"'Take them and see,' said the Fairy Godmother, and Tom, who was always
+an obedient lad, did as he was told. He gathered up the broken plates,
+put them in his basket, and went up to the house.
+
+"'Here are your plates,' he said, all of a tremble as he entered.
+
+"'Let's see if any of them are broken,' said the merchant in a voice so
+gruff that Tom trembled all the harder. Surely he was now in worse
+trouble than ever.
+
+"'H'm!' said the rich man taking one out and looking at it. 'That seems
+to be all right.'
+
+"'Yes,' said Tom, meekly, surprised to note that the plate was as good
+as ever. 'It has been very neatly mended.'
+
+"'Very what?' roared the rich man, who didn't want mended plates. 'Did
+you say mended?'
+
+"'Oh, no, sir!' stammered Tom, who saw that he had made a bad mistake.
+'That is, I didn't mean to say mended. I meant to say that they'd been
+very highly recommended.'
+
+"'Oh! Recommended, eh?' returned the rich man more calmly. 'That's
+different. The rest of them seem to be all right, too. Here, take your
+basket and go along with you. Good-by!'
+
+"And so Tom left the merchant's house very much pleased to have got out
+of his scrape so easily, and feeling very grateful to his Fairy
+Godmother for having helped him.
+
+"'Well,' said she, when he got back to the gate where she was awaiting
+him, 'was everything all right?'
+
+"'Yes,' said Tom, happily. 'The plates were all right, and now they are
+all left.'
+
+"The Fairy Godmother laughed and said he was a bright boy, and then she
+asked him which he would rather do: pay fifty cents to go to the circus
+once, or wear the coat of invisibility and walk in and out as many times
+as he wanted to. To this Tom, who was a real boy, and preferred going to
+the circus six times to going only once, replied that as he was afraid
+he might lose the fifty cents he thought he would take the coat, though
+he also thought, he said, if his dear Fairy Godmother could find it in
+her heart to let him have both the coat and the fifty cents he could
+find use for them.
+
+"At this the Fairy Godmother laughed again, and said she guessed he
+could, and, giving him two shining silver quarters and the coat of
+invisibility, she made a mysterious remark, which he could not
+understand, and disappeared. Tom kissed his hand toward the spot where
+she had stood, now vacant, and ran gleefully homeward, happy as a bird,
+for he had at last succeeded in obtaining the means for his visit to the
+circus. That night, so excited was he, he hardly slept a wink, and even
+when he did sleep, he dreamed of such unpleasant things as the bitter
+medicines of the doctor and the broken plates, so that it was just as
+well he should spend the greater part of the night awake.
+
+"His excitement continued until the hour for going to the circus
+arrived, when he put on his coat of invisibility and started. To test
+the effect of the coat he approached one of his chums, who was standing
+in the middle of the long line of boys waiting for the doors to open,
+and tweaked his nose, deciding from the expression on his friend's
+face--one of astonishment, alarm, and mystification--that he really was
+invisible, and so, proceeding to the gates, he passed by the
+ticket-taker into the tent without interference from any one. It was
+simply lovely; all the seats in the place were unoccupied, and he could
+have his choice of them. Surely nobody could ask for anything better.
+
+"You may be sure he chose one well down in front, so that he should miss
+no part of the performance, and then he waited for the beginning of the
+very wonderful series of things that were to come.
+
+"Alas! poor Tom was again doomed to a very mortifying disappointment. He
+forgot that his invisibility made his lovely front seat appear to be
+unoccupied, and while he was looking off in another direction a great,
+heavy, fat man entered and sat down upon him, squeezing him so hard that
+he could scarcely breathe, and as for howling, that was altogether out
+of the question, and there through the whole performance the fat man
+sat, and the invisible Tom saw not one of the marvelous acts or the
+wonderful animals, and, what was worse, when a joke was got off he
+couldn't see whether it was by the clown or the ring-master, and so
+didn't know when to laugh even if he had wanted to. It was the most
+dreadful disappointment Tom ever had, and he went home crying, and spent
+the night groaning and moaning with sorrow.
+
+"It was not until he began to dress for breakfast next morning, and his
+two beautiful quarters rolled out of his pocket on the floor, that he
+remembered he still had the means to go again. When he had made this
+discovery he became happy once more, and started off with his invisible
+coat hanging over his arm, and paid his way in for the second and last
+performance like all the other boys. This time he saw all there was to
+be seen, and was full of happiness, until the lions' cage was brought
+in, when he thought it would be a fine thing to put on his invisible
+coat, and enter the cage with the lion-tamer, which he did, having so
+exciting a time looking at the lions and keeping out of their way that
+he forgot to watch the tamer when he went out, so that finally when the
+circus was all over Tom found himself locked in the cage with the lions
+with nothing but raw meat to eat. This was bad enough, but what was
+worse, the next city in which the circus was to exhibit was hundreds of
+miles away from the town in which Tom lived, and no one was expected to
+open the cage doors again for four weeks.
+
+"When Tom heard this he was frightened to death almost, and rather than
+spend all that time shut up in a small cage with the kings of the
+beasts, he threw off the coat of invisibility and shrieked, and then--"
+
+"Yes--then what?" cried Jimmieboy, breathlessly, so excited that he
+could not help interrupting the corporal, despite the story-teller's
+warning.
+
+    "The bull-dog said he thought it might,
+       But pussy she said 'Nay,'
+     At which the unicorn took fright,
+       And stole a bale of hay,"
+
+snored the corporal with a yawn.
+
+"That can't be it! that can't be it!" cried Jimmieboy, so excited to
+hear what happened to little Tom in the lions' cage that he began to
+shake the corporal almost fiercely.
+
+"What can't be what?" asked the corporal, sitting up and opening his
+eyes. "What are you trying to talk about, general?"
+
+"Tom--and the circus--what happened to him in the lions' cage when he
+took off his coat?" cried Jimmieboy.
+
+"Tom? And the circus? I don't know anything about any Tom or any
+circus," replied the corporal, with a sleepy nod.
+
+"But you've just been snoring to me about it," remonstrated Jimmieboy.
+
+"Don't remember it at all," said the corporal. "I must have been asleep
+and dreamed it, or else you did, or maybe both of us did; but tell me,
+general, in confidence now, and don't ever tell anybody I
+asked you, have you such a thing as a--as a gum-drop in your pocket?"
+
+And Jimmieboy was so put out with the corporal for waking up just at
+the wrong time that he wouldn't answer him, but turned on his heel, and
+walked away very much concerned in his mind as to the possible fate of
+poor little Tom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+A DISAGREEABLE PERSONAGE.
+
+
+It cannot be said that Jimmieboy was entirely happy after his falling
+out with the corporal. Of course it was very inconsiderate of the
+corporal to wake up at the most exciting period of his fairy story, and
+leave his commanding officer in a state of uncertainty as to the fate of
+little Tom; but as he walked along the road, and thought the matter all
+over, Jimmieboy reflected that after all he was himself as much to blame
+as the corporal. In the first place, he had interrupted him in his story
+at the point where it became most interesting, though warned in advance
+not to do so, and in the second, he had not fallen back upon his
+undoubted right as a general to command the corporal to go to sleep
+again, and to stay so until his little romance was finished to the
+satisfaction of his superior officer. The latter was without question
+the thing he should have done, and at first he thought he would go back
+and tell the corporal he was very sorry he hadn't done so. Indeed, he
+would have gone back had he not met, as he rounded the turn, a
+singular-looking little fellow, who, sitting high in an oak-tree at the
+side of the road, attracted his attention by winking at him. Ordinarily
+Jimmieboy would not have noticed anybody who winked at him, because his
+papa had told him that people who would wink would smoke a pipe, which
+was very wrong, particularly in people who were as small as this droll
+person in the tree. But the singular-looking little fellow winked aloud,
+and Jimmieboy could not help noticing him. Like most small boys
+Jimmieboy delighted in noises, especially noises that went off like
+pop-guns, which was just the kind of noise the tree dwarf made when he
+winked.
+
+"Hello, you!" said Jimmieboy, as the sounds first attracted his
+attention. "What are you doing up there?"
+
+"Sitting on a limb and counting the stars in the sky," answered the
+dwarf.
+
+Jimmieboy laughed. This seemed such a curious thing to do.
+
+"How many are there?" he asked.
+
+"Seventeen," replied the dwarf.
+
+"Ho!" jeered Jimmieboy.
+
+"There are, really," said the dwarf. "I counted 'em myself."
+
+"There's more than that," said Jimmieboy. "I've had stories told me of
+twenty-seven or twenty-eight."
+
+"That doesn't prove anything," returned the dwarf, "that is, nothing but
+what I said. If there are twenty-eight there must be seventeen, so you
+can't catch me up on that."
+
+"Come down," said Jimmieboy. "I want to see you."
+
+"I can't come now," returned the dwarf. "I'm too busy counting the
+eighteenth star, but I'll drop my telescope and let you see me through
+that."
+
+"I'll help you count the stars if you come," put in Jimmieboy. "How many
+stars can you count a day?"
+
+"Oh, about one and a half," said the dwarf. "I could count more than
+that, only I'm cross-eyed and see double, so that after I've got through
+counting, I have to divide the whole number by two to get the proper
+figures, and I never was good at dividing. I've always hated
+division--particularly division of apples and peaches. There is no
+meaner sum in any arithmetic in the world than that I used to have to
+do every time I got an apple when I was your age."
+
+"What was the sum?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"It was to divide one apple by three boys," returned the queer little
+man. "Most generally that would be regarded as a case of three into one,
+but in this instance it was one into three; and, worse than all, while
+it pretended to be division, and was as hard as division, as far as I
+was concerned it was subtraction too, and I was always the leftest part
+of the remainder."
+
+"But I don't see why you had to divide your apples every time you got
+any," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"That's easy enough to explain," said the dwarf. "If I didn't divide,
+and did eat the whole apple, I'd have a fearful pain in my heart;
+whereas if I gave my little brothers each a third, it would often happen
+that they would get the pain and not I. After one or two experiments I
+fixed it so that I never got the pain part any more--for you know every
+apple has an ache in it--and they did, so, you see, I kept myself well
+as could be, and at the same time built up quite a reputation for
+generosity."
+
+"How did you fix it so as to give them the pain part always?" queried
+Jimmieboy.
+
+"Why, I located the part of the apple that held the pain. I did not
+divide one apple I got, but ate the whole thing myself, part by part. I
+studied each part carefully, and discovered that apples are divided by
+Nature into three parts, anyhow. Pleasure was one part, pain was another
+part, and the third part was just nothing--neither pleasure nor pain.
+The core is where the ache is, the crisp is where the pleasure is, and
+the skin represents the part which isn't anything. When I found that out
+I said, 'Here! What is a good enough plan for Nature is a good enough
+plan for me. I'll divide my apples on Nature's plan.' Which I did. To
+one brother I gave the core; to the other the skin; the rest I ate
+myself."
+
+"It was very mean of you to make your brothers suffer the pain," said
+Jimmieboy.
+
+"Well, they had their days off. One time one brother'd have the core;
+another time the other brother'd have it. They took turns," said the
+dwarf.
+
+"It was mean, anyhow!" cried Jimmieboy, who was so fond of his own
+little brother that he would gladly have borne all his pains for him if
+it could have been arranged.
+
+"Well, meanness is my business," said the dwarf.
+
+"Your business?" echoed Jimmieboy, opening his eyes wide with
+astonishment, meanness seemed such a strange business.
+
+"Certainly," returned the dwarf. "Don't you know what I am? I am an
+unfairy."
+
+"What's that?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"You know what a fairy is, don't you?" said the dwarf.
+
+"Yes. It's a dear lovely creature with wings, that goes about doing
+good."
+
+"That's right. An unfairy is just the opposite," explained the dwarf. "I
+go about doing unfair things. I am the fairy that makes things go wrong.
+When your hat blows off in the street the chances are that I have paid
+the bellows man, who works up all these big winds we have, to do it. If
+I see people having a good time on a picnic, I fly up to the sky and
+push a rain cloud over where they are and drench them, having first of
+course either hidden or punched great holes in their umbrellas. Oh, I
+can tell you, I am the meanest creature that ever was. Why, do you know
+what I did once in a country school?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Jimmieboy, in tones of disgust. "I don't know
+anything about mean things."
+
+"Well, you ought to know about this," returned the dwarf, "because it
+was just the meanest thing anybody ever did. There was a boy who'd
+studied awfully hard in hopes that he would lead his class when the
+holidays came, and there was another boy in the school who was equal to
+him in everything but arithmetic, and who would have been beaten on that
+one point, so that the other boy would have stood where he wanted to,
+only I helped the second boy by rubbing out all the correct answers of
+the first boy and putting others on the slate instead, so that the first
+boy lost first place and had to take second. Wasn't that mean?"
+
+"It was horrid," said Jimmieboy, "and it's a good thing you didn't come
+down here when I asked you to, for if you had, I think I should now be
+slapping you just as hard as I could."
+
+"Another time," said the unfairy, ignoring Jimmieboy's remark, "I turned
+myself into a horse-fly and bothered a lame horse; then I changed into a
+bull-dog and barked all night under the window of a man who wanted to go
+to sleep, but my regular trick is going around to hat stores and taking
+the brushes and brushing all the beaver hats the wrong way. Sometimes
+when people get lost here in the woods and want to go to
+Tiddledywinkland, I give them the wrong directions, so that they bring
+up on the other side of the country, where they don't want to be; and
+once last winter I put rust on the runners of a little boy's sled so
+that he couldn't use it, and then when he'd spent three days getting
+them polished up, I pushed a warm rain cloud over the hill where the
+snow was and melted it all away. I hide toys I know children will be
+sure to want; I tear the most exciting pages out of books; I spill salt
+in the sugar-bowls and plant weeds in the gardens; I upset the ink on
+love-letters; when I find a man with only one collar I fray it at the
+edges; I roll collar buttons under bureaus; I--"
+
+"Don't you dare tell me another thing!" cried Jimmieboy, angrily. "I
+don't like you, and I won't listen to you any more."
+
+"Oh, yes, you will," replied the unfairy. "I am just mean enough to make
+you, and I'll tell you why. I am very tired of my business, and I think
+if I tell you all the horrid things I do, maybe you'll tell me how I can
+keep from doing them. I have known you for a long time, only you didn't
+know it."
+
+"I don't believe it," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Well, I have, just the same," returned the dwarf. "And I can prove it.
+Do you remember, one day you went out walking, how you walked two miles
+and only met one mud-puddle, and fell into that?"
+
+"Yes, I do," said Jimmieboy, sadly. "I spoiled my new suit when I fell,
+and I never knew how I came to do it."
+
+"I made you do that!" said the unfairy, triumphantly. "I grabbed hold of
+your foot, and upset you right into it. I waited two hours to do it,
+too."
+
+"You did, eh?" said Jimmieboy. "Well, I wish I had an axe. I'd chop that
+tree down, and catch you and make you sorry for it."
+
+"I am sorry for it," said the dwarf. "Real sorry. I've never ceased to
+regret it."
+
+"Oh, well, I forgive you," said Jimmieboy, "if you are really sorry."
+
+"Yes, I am," said the dwarf; "I'm awfully sorry, because I didn't do it
+right. You only ruined your suit and not that beautiful red necktie you
+had on. Next time I'll be more careful and spoil everything. But let me
+give you more proof that I've known you. Who do you suppose it was bent
+your railway tracks at Christmas so they wouldn't work?"
+
+"You!" ejaculated Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes, sirree!" roared the dwarf. "I did, and, what is more, it was I
+who chewed up your best shoes and bit your plush dog's head off; it was
+I who ate up your luncheon one day last March; it was I who pawed up all
+the geraniums in your flower-bed; and it was I who nipped your friend
+the postman in the leg on St. Valentine's day so that he lost your
+valentine."
+
+"I've caught you there," said Jimmieboy. "It wasn't you that did those
+things at all. It was a horrid little brown dog that used to play around
+our house did all that."
+
+"You think you are smart," laughed the dwarf. "But you aren't. I was the
+little brown dog."
+
+"I don't see how you can have any friends if that is the way you
+behave," said Jimmieboy, after a minute or two of silence. "You don't
+deserve any."
+
+"No," said the dwarf, his voice trembling a little--for as Jimmieboy
+peered up into the tree at him he could see that he was crying just a
+bit--"I haven't any, and I never had. I never had anybody to set me a
+good example. My father and my mother were unfairies before me, and I
+just grew to be one like them. I didn't want to be one, but I had to be;
+and really it wasn't until I saw you pat a hand-organ monkey on the
+head, instead of giving him a piece of cake with red pepper on it, as I
+would have done, that I ever even dreamed that there were kind people in
+the world. After I'd watched you for a while and had seen how happy you
+were, and how many friends you had, I began to see how it was that I was
+so miserable. I was miserable because I was mean, but nobody has ever
+told me how not to be mean, and I'm just real upset over it."
+
+"Poor fellow!" said Jimmieboy, sympathetically. "I am really very, very
+sorry for you."
+
+"So am I," sobbed the dwarf. "I wish you could help me."
+
+"Perhaps I can," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Well, wait a minute," said the dwarf, drying his eyes and peering
+intently down the road. "Wait a minute. There is a sheep down the road
+there tangled up in the brambles. Wait until I change myself into a big
+black dog and scare her half to death."
+
+"But that will be mean," returned Jimmieboy; "and if you want to change,
+and be good, and kind, why don't you begin now and help the sheep out?"
+
+"H'm!" said the dwarf. "Now that is an idea, isn't it! Do you know, I'd
+never have thought of that if you hadn't suggested it to me. I think I
+will. I'll change myself into a good-hearted shepherd's boy, and free
+that poor animal at once!"
+
+The dwarf was as good as his word, and in a moment he came back, smiling
+as happily as though he had made a great fortune.
+
+"Why, it's lovely to do a thing like that. Beautiful!" he said. "Do you
+know, Jimmieboy, I've half a mind to turn mean again for just a minute,
+and go back and frighten that sheep back into the bushes just for the
+bliss of helping her out once more."
+
+"I wouldn't do that," said Jimmieboy, with a shake of his head. "I'd
+just change myself into a good fairy if I were you, and go about doing
+kind things. When you see people having a picnic, push the rain cloud
+away from them instead of over them. Do just the opposite from what
+you've been doing all along, and pretty soon you'll have heaps and heaps
+of friends."
+
+"You are a wonderful boy," said the dwarf. "Why, you've hit without
+thinking a minute the plan I've been searching for for years and years
+and years, and I'll do just what you say. Watch!"
+
+The dwarf pronounced one or two queer words the like of which Jimmieboy
+had never heard before, and, presto change! quick as a wink the unfairy
+had disappeared, and there stood at the small general's side the
+handsomest, sweetest little sprite he had ever even dreamed or read
+about. The sprite threw his arms about Jimmieboy's neck and kissed him
+affectionately, wiped a tear of joy from his eye, and then said:
+
+"I am so glad I met you. You have taught me how to be happy, and I am
+sure I have lost eighteen hundred and seven tons in weight, I feel so
+light and gay; and--joy! oh, joy! I no longer see double! My eyes must
+be straight."
+
+"They are," said Jimmieboy. "Straight as--straight as--well, as straight
+as your hair is curly."
+
+And that was as good an illustration as he could have found, for the
+sprite's hair was just as curly as it could be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ARRANGEMENTS FOR A DUEL.
+
+
+"Where are you going, Jimmieboy?" asked the sprite, after they had
+walked along in silence for a few minutes.
+
+"I haven't the slightest idea," said Jimmieboy, with a short laugh. "I
+started out to provision the forces before pursuing the Parawelopipedon,
+but I seem to have fallen out with everybody who could show me where to
+go, and I am all at sea."
+
+"Well, you haven't fallen out with me," said the sprite. "In fact,
+you've fallen in with me, so that you are on dry land again. I'll show
+you where to go, if you want me to."
+
+"Then you know where I can find the candied cherries and other things
+that soldiers eat?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"No, I don't know where you can find anything of the sort," returned the
+sprite. "But I do know that all things come to him who waits, so I'd
+advise you to wait until the candied cherries and so forth come to you."
+
+"But what'll I do while I am waiting?" asked Jimmieboy, who had no wish
+to be idle in this new and strange country.
+
+"Follow me, of course," said the sprite, "and I'll show you the most
+wonderful things you ever saw. I'll take you up to see old
+Fortyforefoot, the biggest giant in all the world; after that we'll stop
+in at Alltart's bakery and have lunch. It's a great bakery, Alltart's
+is. You just wish for any kind of cake in the world, and you have it in
+your mouth."
+
+"Let's go there first, I'm afraid of giants," said Jimmieboy. "They eat
+little boys like me."
+
+"Well, I don't blame them for that," said the sprite. "A little boy as
+sweet as you are is almost too good not to eat; but I'll take care of
+you. Fortyforefoot I haven't a doubt would like to eat both of us, but I
+have a way of getting the best of fellows of that sort, so if you'll
+come along you needn't have the slightest fear for your safety."
+
+"All right," said Jimmieboy, after thinking it all over. "Go ahead. I'll
+follow you."
+
+At this moment the galloping step of a horse was heard approaching, and
+in a minute Major Blueface rode up.
+
+"Why, how do you do, general?" he cried, his face beaming with pleasure
+as he reined in his steed and dismounted. "I haven't seen you
+in--my!--why, not in years, sir. How have you been?"
+
+"Quite well," said Jimmieboy, with a smile, for the major amused him
+very much. "It doesn't seem more than five minutes since I saw you
+last," he added, with a sly wink at the sprite.
+
+"Oh, it must be longer than that," said the major, gravely. "It must be
+at least ten, but they have seemed years to me--a seeming, sir, that is
+well summed up in that lovely poem a friend of mine wrote some time ago:
+
+    "'When I have quarreled with a dear
+     Old friend, a minute seems a year;
+     And you'll remember without doubt
+     That when we parted we fell out.'"
+
+"Very pretty," said the sprite. "Very pretty, indeed. Reminds me of the
+poems of Major Blueface. You've heard of him, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes," said the major, frowning at the sprite, whom he had never met
+before. "I have heard of Major Blueface, and not only have I heard of
+him, but I am also one of his warmest friends and admirers."
+
+"Really?" said the sprite, not noticing apparently that Jimmieboy was
+nearly exploding with mirth. "How charming! What sort of a person is the
+major, sir?"
+
+"Superb!" returned the major, his chest swelling with pride. "Brave as a
+lobster, witty as a porcupine, and handsome as a full-blown rose. In
+short, he is a wonder. Many a time have I been with him on the field of
+battle, where a man most truly shows what he is, and there it was, sir,
+that I learned to love and admire Major Blueface. Why, once I saw that
+man hit square in the back by the full charge of a brass cannon loaded
+to the muzzle with dried pease. The force of the blow was
+tremendous--forcible enough, sir, in fact, to knock the major off his
+feet, but he never quailed. He rose with dignity, and walked back to
+where the enemy was standing, and dared him to do it again, and when the
+enemy did it again, the major did not forget, as some soldiers would
+have done under the circumstances, that he was a gentleman, but he rose
+up a second time and thanked the enemy for his courtesy, which so won
+the enemy's heart that he surrendered at once."
+
+"What a hero!" said the sprite.
+
+"Hero is no name for it, sir. He is a whole history full of heroes. On
+another occasion which I recall," cried the major, with enthusiasm, "on
+another occasion he was pursued by a lion around a circular path--he is
+a magnificent runner, the major is--and he ran so much faster than the
+lion that he soon caught up with his pursuer from the rear, and with one
+blow of his sword severed the raging beast's tail from his body. Then he
+sat down and waited until the lion got around to him again, his appetite
+increased so by the exercise he had taken that he would have eaten
+anything, and then what do you suppose that brave soldier did?"
+
+"What?" asked Jimmieboy, who had stopped laughing to listen.
+
+"He gave the hungry creature his own tail to eat, and then went home,"
+returned the major.
+
+"Is that a true story?" asked the sprite.
+
+"Do you think I would tell an untrue story?" asked the major, angrily.
+
+"Not at all," said the sprite; "but if the major told it to you, it may
+have grown just a little bit every time you told it."
+
+"No, sir. That could not be, for I am Major Blueface himself,"
+interrupted the major.
+
+"Then you are a brave man," said the sprite, "and I am proud to meet
+you."
+
+"Thank you," said the major, his frown disappearing and his pleasant
+smile returning. "I have heard that remark before; but it is always
+pleasant to hear. But what are you doing now, general?" he added,
+turning and addressing Jimmieboy.
+
+"I am still searching for the provisions, major," returned Jimmieboy.
+"The soldiers were so tired I hadn't the heart to command them to get
+them for me, as you said, so I am as badly off as ever."
+
+"I think you need a rest," said the major, gravely; "and while it is
+extremely important that the forces should be provided with all the
+canned goods necessary to prolong their lives, the health of the
+commanding officer is also a most precious consideration. As
+commander-in-chief why don't you grant yourself a ten years' vacation on
+full pay, and at the end of that time return to the laborious work you
+have undertaken, refreshed?"
+
+"But what becomes of the war?" asked Jimmieboy. "If I go off, there
+won't be any war."
+
+"No, but what of it?" replied the major. "That'll spite the enemy just
+as much as it will our side; and maybe he'll get so tired waiting for
+us to begin that he'll lie down and die or else give himself up."
+
+"Well, I don't know what to do," said Jimmieboy, very much perplexed.
+"What would you do?" he continued, addressing the sprite.
+
+"I'd hire some one else to take my place if I were you, and let him do
+the fighting and provisioning until you are all ready," said the sprite.
+
+"Yes, but whom can I hire?" asked the boy.
+
+"The Giant Fortyforefoot," returned the sprite. "He'd be just the man.
+He's a great warrior in the first place and a great magician in the
+second. He can do the most wonderful tricks you ever saw in all your
+life. For instance,
+
+    "He'll take two ordinary balls,
+       He'll toss 'em to the sky,
+     And each when to the earth it falls
+       Will be a satin tie.
+
+     He'll take a tricycle in hand,
+       He'll give the thing a heave,
+     He'll mutter some queer sentence, and
+       'Twill go right up his sleeve.
+
+     He'll ask you what your name may be,
+       And if you answer 'Jim!'
+     He'll turn a handspring--one, two, three!
+       Your name will then be Tim.
+
+     He'll take a fifty-dollar bill,
+       He'll tie it to a chain,
+     He'll cry out 'Presto!' and you will
+       Not see your bill again."
+
+"I'd like to see him," said Jimmieboy. "But I can't say I want to be
+eaten up, you know, and I'd like to have you tell me before we go how
+you are going to prevent his eating me."
+
+"Very proper," said Major Blueface. "You suffer under the great
+disadvantage of being a very toothsome, tender morsel, and in all
+probability Fortyforefoot would order you stewed in cream or made over
+into a tart. My!" added the major, smacking his lips so suggestively
+that Jimmieboy drew away from him, slightly alarmed. "Why, it makes my
+mouth water to think of a pudding made of you, with a touch of cinnamon
+and a dash of maple syrup, and a shake of sawdust and a hard sauce.
+Tlah!"
+
+This last word of the major's was a sort of ecstatic cluck such as boys
+often make after having tasted something they are particularly fond of.
+
+"What's the use of scaring the boy, Blueface?" said the sprite, angrily,
+as he noted Jimmieboy's alarm. "I won't have anymore of that. You can be
+as brave and terrible as you please in the presence of your enemies, but
+in the presence of my friends you've got to behave yourself."
+
+The major laughed heartily.
+
+"Jimmieboy afraid of me?" he said. "Nonsense! Why, he could rout me
+with a frown. His little finger could, unaided, put me to flight if it
+felt so disposed. I was complimenting him--not trying to frighten him.
+
+    "When I went into ecstasies
+       O'er pudding made of him,
+     'Twas just because I wished to please
+       The honorable Jim;
+     And now, in spite of your rebuff,
+       The statement I repeat:
+     I think he's really good enough
+       For any one to eat."
+
+"Well, that's different," said the sprite, accepting the major's
+statement. "I quite agree with you there; but when you go clucking
+around here like a hen who has just tasted the sweetest grain of corn
+she ever had, or like a boy after eating a plate of ice-cream, you're
+just a bit terrifying--particularly to the appetizing morsel that has
+given rise to those clucks. It's enough to make the stoutest heart
+quail."
+
+"Nonsense!" retorted the major, with a wink at Jimmieboy. "Neither my
+manner nor the manner of any other being could make a stout hart quail,
+because stout harts are deer and quails are birds!"
+
+This more or less feeble joke served to put the three travelers in good
+humor again. Jimmieboy smiled over it; the sprite snickered, and the
+major threw himself down on the grass in a perfect paroxysm of laughter.
+When he had finished he got up again and said:
+
+"Well, what are we going to do about it? I propose we attack
+Fortyforefoot unawares and tie his hands behind his back. Then Jimmieboy
+will be safe."
+
+"You are a wonderfully wise person," retorted the sprite. "How on earth
+is Fortyforefoot to show his tricks if we tie his hands?"
+
+"By means of his tricks," returned the major. "If he is any kind of a
+magician he'll get his hands free in less than a minute."
+
+"Then why tie them at all?" asked the sprite. "I'm not good at
+conundrums," said the major. "Why?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," returned the sprite, impatiently.
+
+"Then why waste time asking riddles to which you don't know the answer?"
+roared the major. "You'll have me mad in a minute, and when I'm mad woe
+be unto him which I'm angry at."
+
+"Don't quarrel," said Jimmieboy, stepping between his two friends, with
+whom it seemed to be impossible to keep peace for any length of time.
+"If you quarrel I shall leave you both and go back to my company."
+
+"Very well," returned the major. "I accept the sprite's apology. But he
+mustn't do it again. Now as you have chosen to reject my plan of
+attacking Fortyforefoot and tying his hands, suppose you suggest
+something better, Mr. Sprite."
+
+"I think the safe thing would be for Jimmieboy to wear this invisible
+coat of mine when in the giant's presence. If Fortyforefoot can't see
+him he is safe," said the sprite.
+
+"I don't see any invisible coat anywhere," said the major. "Where is
+it?"
+
+"Nobody can see it, of course," said the sprite, scornfully. "Do you
+know what invisible means?"
+
+"Yes, I do," retorted the major. "I only pretended I didn't so that I
+could make you ask the question, which enables me to say that something
+invisible is something you can't see, like your jokes."
+
+"I can make a better joke than you can with my hands tied behind my
+back," snapped the sprite.
+
+"I can't make jokes with your hands tied behind your back, but I can
+make one with my own hands tied behind my back that Jimmieboy here can
+see with his eyes shut," said the major, scornfully.
+
+"What is it? I like jokes," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Why--er--let me see; why--er--when is a sunbeam sharp?" asked the
+major, who did not expect to be taken up so quickly.
+
+"I don't know; when?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"When it's a ray, sir. See? Ray, sir--razor. Ha! ha! Pretty good, eh?"
+laughed the major.
+
+"Bad as can be," said the sprite, his nose turned up until it interfered
+with his eyesight. "Now hear mine, Jimmieboy. When is a joke not a
+joke?"
+
+"Haven't the slightest idea," observed Jimmieboy, after scratching his
+head and trying to think for a minute or two.
+
+"When it's one of the major's," roared the sprite, whereat the woods
+rang with his laughter.
+
+The major first turned pale and then grew red in the face.
+
+"That settles it," he said, throwing off his coat. "That is a deadly
+insult, and there is now no possible way to avoid a duel."
+
+"I am ready for you at any time," said the sprite, calmly. "Only as the
+challenged party I have the choice of weapons, and inasmuch as this is a
+hot day, I choose the jawbone."
+
+"Not a talking match, I hope?" said the major, with a gesture of
+impatience.
+
+"Not at all," replied the sprite. "A story-telling contest. We will
+withdraw to that moss-covered rock underneath the trees in there, gather
+enough huckleberries and birch bark for our luncheon, and catch a mess
+of trout from the brook to go with them, and then we can fight our duel
+all the rest of the afternoon."
+
+"But how's that going to satisfy my wounded honor?" asked the major.
+
+"I'll tell one story," said the sprite, "and you'll tell another, and
+when we are through, the one that Jimmieboy says has told the best story
+will be the victor. That is better than trying to hurt each other, I
+think."
+
+"I think so too," put in Jimmieboy. "I'm ready for it."
+
+"Well, it isn't a bad scheme," agreed the major. "Particularly the
+luncheon part of it; so you may count on me. I've got a story that will
+lift your hair right off your head."
+
+So Jimmieboy and his two strange friends retired into the wood, gathered
+the huckleberries and birch bark, caught, cooked, and ate the trout, and
+then sat down together on the moss-covered rock to fight the duel. The
+two fighters drew lots to find out which should tell the first story,
+and as the sprite was the winner, he began.
+
+And the story he told was as follows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE SPRITE'S STORY.
+
+
+"When I was not more than a thousand years old--" said the sprite.
+
+"Excuse me," interrupted the major. "But what was the figure?"
+
+"One thousand," returned the sprite. "That was nine thousand years
+ago--before this world was made. I celebrated my
+ten-thousand-and-sixteenth birthday last Friday--but that has nothing to
+do with my story. When I was not more than a thousand years of age, my
+parents, who occupied a small star about forty million miles from here,
+finding that my father could earn a better living if he were located
+nearer the moon, moved away from my birthplace and rented a good-sized,
+four-pronged star in the suburbs of the great orb of night. In the old
+star we were too far away from the markets for my father to sell the
+products of his farm for anything like what they cost him; freight
+charges were very heavy, and often the stage-coach that ran between
+Twinkleville and the moon would not stop at Twinkleville at all, and
+then all the stuff that we had raised that week would get stale, lose
+its fizz, and have to be thrown away."
+
+"Let me beg your pardon again," put in the major. "But what did you
+raise on your farm? I never heard of farm products having fizz to lose."
+
+"We raised soda-water chiefly," returned the sprite, amiably.
+"Soda-water and suspender buttons. The soda-water was cultivated and the
+suspender buttons seemed to grow wild. We never knew exactly how; though
+from what I have learned since about them, I think I begin to understand
+the science of it; and I wish now that I could find a way to return to
+Twinkleville, because I am certain it must be a perfect treasure-house
+of suspender buttons by this time. Even in my day they used to lie about
+by the million--metallic buttons every one of them. They must be worth
+to-day at least a dollar a thousand."
+
+"What is your idea about the way they happened to come there, based on
+what you have learned since?" asked the major.
+
+"Well, it is a very simple idea," returned the sprite. "You know when a
+suspender button comes off it always disappears. Of course it must go
+somewhere, but the question is, where? No one has ever yet been known to
+recover the suspender button he has once really lost; and my notion of
+it is simply that the minute a metal suspender button comes off the
+clothes of anybody in all the whole universe, it immediately flies up
+through the air and space to Twinkleville, which is nothing more than a
+huge magnet, and lies there until somebody picks it up and tries to sell
+it. I remember as a boy sweeping our back yard clear of them one
+evening, and waking the next morning to find the whole place covered
+with them again; but we never could make money on them, because the moon
+was our sole market, and only the best people of the moon ever used
+suspenders, and as these were unfortunately relatives of ours, we had to
+give them all the buttons they wanted for nothing, so that the button
+crops became rather an expense to us than otherwise. But with soda-water
+it was different. Everybody, it doesn't make any difference where he
+lives, likes soda-water, and it was an especially popular thing in the
+moon, where the plain water is always so full of fish that nobody can
+drink it. But as I said before, often the stage-coach wouldn't or
+couldn't stop, and we found ourselves getting poorer every day. Finally
+my father made up his mind to lease, and move into this new star, sink a
+half-dozen soda-water wells there, and by means of a patent he owned,
+which enabled him to give each well a separate and distinct flavor,
+drive everybody else out of the business."
+
+"You don't happen to remember how that patent your father owned worked,
+do you?" asked the major, noticing that Jimmieboy seemed particularly
+interested when the sprite mentioned this. "If you do, I'd like to buy
+the plan of it from you and give it to Jimmieboy for a Christmas
+present, so that he can have soda-water wells in his own back yard at
+home."
+
+"No, I can't remember anything about it," said the sprite. "Nine
+thousand years is a long time to remember things of that kind, though I
+don't think the scheme was a very hard one to work. For vanilla cream,
+it only required a well with plain soda-water in it with a quart of
+vanilla beans and three pints of cream poured into it four times a week;
+same way with other flavors--a quart of strawberries for strawberry,
+sarsaparilla for sarsaparilla, and so forth; but the secret was in the
+pouring; there was something in the way papa did the pouring; I never
+knew just what it was. He always insisted on doing the pouring himself.
+But if you don't stop asking questions I'll never finish my story."
+
+"You shouldn't make it so interesting if you don't want us to have our
+curiosity excited by it," said Jimmieboy. "I'd have asked those
+questions if the major hadn't. But go ahead. What happened?"
+
+"Well, we moved, and in a very short time were comfortably settled in
+the suburban star I have mentioned," continued the sprite. "As we
+expected, my father grew very, very rich. He was referred to in the moon
+newspapers as 'The Soda-water King,' and once an article about him said
+that he owned the finest suspender-button mine in the universe, which
+was more or less true, but which, as it turned out, was unfortunate in
+its results. Some moon people hearing of his ownership of the
+Twinkleville Button Mines came to him and tried to persuade him that
+they ought to be worked. Father said he didn't see any use of it,
+because the common people didn't wear suspenders, and so didn't need the
+buttons.
+
+"'True,' said they, 'but we can compel them to need them, by making a
+law requiring that everybody over sixteen shall wear suspenders.'
+
+"'That's a good idea,' said my father, and he tried to have it made a
+law that every one should wear suspenders, high or low, and as a result
+he got everybody mad at him. The best people were angry, because up to
+that time the wearing of suspenders had been regarded as a sign of noble
+birth, and if everybody, including the common people, were to have them
+they would cease to be so. The common people themselves were angry,
+because to have to buy suspenders would simply be an addition to the
+cost of living, and they hadn't any money to spare. In consequence we
+were cut off by the best people of the moon. Nobody ever came to see us
+except the very commonest kind of common people, and they came at night,
+and then only to drop pailfuls of cod-liver oil, squills, ipecac, and
+other unpopular things into our soda-water wells, so that in a very
+short time my poor father's soda-water business was utterly ruined.
+People don't like to order ten quarts of vanilla cream soda-water for
+Sunday dinner, and find it flavored with cod-liver oil, you know."
+
+"Yes, I do know," said Jimmieboy, screwing his face up in an endeavor to
+give the major and the sprite some idea of how little he liked the taste
+of cod-liver oil. "I think cod-liver oil is worse than measles or
+mumps, because you can't have measles or mumps more than once, and there
+isn't any end to the times you can have cod-liver oil."
+
+"I'm with you there," said the major, emphasizing his remark by slapping
+Jimmieboy on the back. "In fact, sir, on page 29 of my book called
+'Musings on Medicines' you will find--if it is ever published--these
+lines:
+
+          "The oils of cod!
+           The oils of cod!
+     They make me feel tremendous odd,
+           Nor hesitate
+           I here to state
+     I wildly hate the oils of cod."
+
+"Bravo!" cried the sprite. "When I start my autograph album I want you
+to write those lines on the first page."
+
+"With pleasure," returned the major. "When shall you start the album?"
+
+"Never, I hope," replied the sprite, with a chuckle. "And now suppose
+you don't interrupt my story again."
+
+Clouds began to gather on the major's face again. The sprite's rebuke
+had evidently made him very angry.
+
+"Sir," said he, as soon as his feelings permitted him to speak. "If you
+make any more such remarks as that, another duel may be necessary after
+this one is fought--which I should very much regret, for duels of this
+sort consume a great deal of time, and unless I am much mistaken it will
+shortly rain cats and dogs."
+
+"It looks that way," said the sprite, "and it is for that very reason
+that I do not wish to be interrupted again. Of course ruin stared father
+in the face."
+
+"How rude of ruin!" whispered the major to Jimmieboy, who immediately
+silenced him.
+
+"Trade having fallen away," continued the sprite, "we had to draw upon
+our savings for our bread and butter, and finally, when the last penny
+was spent, we made up our minds to leave the moon district entirely and
+try life on the dog-star, where, we were informed, people only had one
+eye apiece, and every man had so much to do that it took all of his one
+eye's time looking after his own business so that there wasn't any left
+for him to spend on other people's business. It seemed to my father that
+in a place like this there was a splendid opening for him."
+
+"In what line?" queried the major.
+
+"Renting out his extra eye to blind men," roared the sprite.
+
+Jimmieboy fell off the rock with laughter, and the major, angry at being
+so neatly caught, rose up and walked away but immediately returned.
+
+"If this wasn't a duel I wouldn't stay here another minute," he said.
+"But you can't put me to flight that way. Go on and finish."
+
+"The question now came up as to how we should get to the dog-star,"
+resumed the sprite. "Our money was all gone. Nobody would lend us any.
+Nobody would help us at all."
+
+"I should think they'd have been so glad you were leaving they'd have
+paid your fare," said the major, but the sprite paid no attention.
+
+"There was no regular stage line between the moon and the dog-star,"
+said he, "and we had only two chances of really getting there, and they
+were both so slim you could count their ribs. One was by getting aboard
+the first comet that was going that way, and the other was by jumping.
+The trouble with the first chance was that as far as any one knew there
+wasn't a comet expected to go in the direction of the dog-star for eight
+million years--which was rather a long time for a starving family to
+wait, and besides we had read of so many accidents in the moon papers
+about people being injured while trying to board comets in motion that
+we were a little timid about it. My father and I could have managed
+very well; but mother might not have--ladies can't even get on horse
+cars in motion without getting hurt, you know.
+
+"Then the other scheme was equally dangerous. It's a pretty big jump
+from the moon to the dog-star, and if you don't aim yourself right you
+are apt to miss it, and either fall into space or land somewhere else
+where you don't want to go. For instance, a cousin of mine
+who lived on Mars wanted to visit us when we lived at Twinkleville, but
+he was too mean to pay his fare, thinking he could jump it cheaper.
+Well, he jumped and where do you suppose he landed?"
+
+"In the sun!" cried the major, in horror.
+
+"No. Nowhere!" returned the sprite. "He's jumping yet. He didn't come
+anywhere near Twinkleville, although he supposed that he was aimed in
+the right direction."
+
+"Will you tell me how you know he's falling yet?" asked the major, who
+didn't seem to believe this part of the sprite's story.
+
+"Certainly. I saw him yesterday through a telescope," replied the
+sprite.
+
+The major began to whistle.
+
+"And he looked very tired, too," said the sprite. "Though as a matter of
+fact he doesn't have to exert himself any. All he has to do is fall,
+and, once you get started, falling is the easiest thing in the world.
+But of course with the remembrance of my cousin's mistake in our minds,
+we didn't care so much about making the jump, and we kept putting it off
+and putting it off until finally some wretched people had a law made
+abolishing us from the moon entirely, which meant that we had to leave
+inside of twenty-four hours; so we packed up our trunks with the few
+possessions we had left and threw them off toward the dog-star; then
+mother and father took hold of hands and jumped and I was to come along
+after them with some of the baggage that we hadn't got ready in time.
+
+"According to my father's instructions I watched him carefully as he
+sped through space to see whether he had started right, and to my great
+joy I observed that he had--that very shortly both he and mother would
+arrive safely on the dog-star--but alas! My joy was soon turned to
+grief, for a terrible thing happened. Our great heavy family trunk that
+had been dispatched first, and with truest aim, landed on the head of
+the King of the dog-star, stove his crown in and nearly killed him.
+Hardly had the king risen up from the ground when he was again knocked
+down by my poor father, who, utterly powerless to slow up or switch
+himself to one side, landed precisely as the trunk had landed on the
+monarch's head, doing quite as much more damage as the trunk had done in
+the beginning. When added to these mishaps a shower of hat-boxes and
+hand-bags, marked with our family name, fell upon the Lord Chief
+Justice, the Prime Minister and the Heir Apparent, my parents were
+arrested and thrown into prison and I decided that the dog-star was no
+place for me. Wild with grief, and without looking to see where I was
+going, nor in fact caring much, I gave a running leap out into space and
+finally through some good fortune landed here on this earth which I have
+found quite good enough for me ever since."
+
+Here the sprite paused and looked at Jimmieboy as much as to say, "How
+is that for a tale of adventure?"
+
+"Is that all?" queried Jimmieboy.
+
+"Mercy!" cried the major, "Isn't it enough?"
+
+"No," said Jimmieboy. "Not quite. I don't see how he could have jumped
+so many years before the world was made and yet land on the world."
+
+"I was five thousand years on the jump," explained the sprite.
+
+"It was leap-year when you started, wasn't it?" asked the major, with a
+sarcastic smile.
+
+"And your parents? What finally became of them?" asked Jimmieboy,
+signaling the major to be quiet.
+
+"I hadn't the heart to inquire. I am afraid they got into serious
+trouble. It's a very serious thing to knock a king down with a trunk and
+land on his head yourself the minute he gets up again," sighed the
+sprite.
+
+"But didn't you tell me your parents were unfairies?" put in Jimmieboy,
+eying the sprite distrustfully.
+
+"Yes; but they were only my adopted parents," explained the sprite.
+"They were a very rich old couple with lots of money and no children, so
+I adopted them not knowing that they were unfairies. When they died they
+left me all their bad habits, and their money went to found a storeroom
+for worn out lawn-mowers. That was a sample of their meanness."
+
+"Well that's a pretty good story," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes," said the sprite, with a pleased smile. "And the best part of it
+is it's all true."
+
+"Tut!" ejaculated the major, scornfully. "Wait until you hear mine."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE MAJOR'S TALE.
+
+
+"A great many years ago when I was a souvenir spoon," said the major, "I
+belonged to a very handsome and very powerful potentate."
+
+"I didn't quite understand what it was you said you were," said the
+sprite, bending forward as if to hear better.
+
+"At the beginning of my story I was a souvenir spoon," returned the
+major.
+
+"Did you begin your career as a spoon?" asked the sprite.
+
+"I did not, sir," replied the major. "I began my career as a nugget in a
+lead mine where I was found by the king of whom I have just spoken, and
+on his return home with me he gave me to his wife who sent me out to a
+lead smith's and had me made over into a souvenir spoon--and a mighty
+handsome spoon I was too. I had a poem engraved on me that said:
+
+    'Aka majo te roo li sah,
+     Pe mink y rali mis tebah.'
+
+Rather pretty thought, don't you think so?" added the major as he
+completed the couplet.
+
+"Very!" said the sprite, with a knowing shake of his head.
+
+"Well, I don't understand it at all," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Ask this native of Twinkleville what it means," observed the major with
+a snicker. "He says it's a pretty thought, so of course he understands
+it--though I assure you I don't, for it doesn't mean anything. I made it
+up, this very minute."
+
+The sprite colored deeply. It was quite evident that he had fallen into
+the trap the major had set for him.
+
+"I was only fooling," he said, with a sickly attempt at a smile. "Go on
+with your story."
+
+"I think perhaps the happiest time of my life was during the hundreds of
+years that I existed in the royal museum as a spoon," resumed the major.
+"I was brought into use only on state occasions. When the King of
+Mangapore gave a state banquet to other kings in the neighborhood I was
+the spoon that was used to ladle out the royal broth."
+
+Here the major paused to smack his lips, and then a small tear appeared
+in one corner of his eye and trickled slowly down the side of his nose.
+
+"I always weep," he said, as soon as he could speak, "when I think of
+that broth. Here is what it was made of:
+
+    'Seven pies of sweetest mince,
+     Then a ripe and mellow quince,
+         Then a quart of tea.
+     Then a pint of cinnamon,
+     Next a roasted apple, done
+         Brown as brown can be.
+
+     Add of orange juice, a gill,
+     And a sugared daffodil,
+         Then a yellow yam.
+     Sixty-seven strawberries
+     Should be added then to these,
+         And a pot of jam.
+
+     Mix with maple syrup and
+     Let it in the ice-box stand
+         Till it's good and cold--
+     Throw a box of raisins in,
+     Stir it well--just make it spin--
+         Till it looks like gold.'
+
+Oh, my!" cried the major. "What a dish it was, and I, I used to be
+dipped into a tureen full of it sixteen times at every royal feast,
+and before the war we had royal feasts on an average of three times
+a day."
+
+"Three royal banquets a day?" cried Jimmieboy, his mouth watering to
+think of it.
+
+"Yes," returned the major. "Three a day until the unhappy war broke out
+which destroyed all my happiness, and resulted in the downfall of
+sixty-four kings."
+
+"How on earth did such a war as that ever happen to be fought?" asked
+the sprite.
+
+"I am sorry to say," replied the major, sadly, "that I was the innocent
+cause of it all. It was on the king's birthday that war was declared. He
+used to have magnificent birthday parties, quite like those that boys
+like Jimmieboy here have, only instead of having a cake with a candle in
+it for each year, King Fuzzywuz used to have one guest for each year,
+and one whole cake for each guest. On his twenty-first birthday he had
+twenty-one guests; on his thirtieth, thirty, and so on; and at every one
+of these parties I used to be passed around to be admired, I was so very
+handsome and valuable."
+
+"Absurd!" said the sprite, with a sneering laugh. "The idea of a lead
+spoon being valuable!"
+
+"If you had ever been able to get into the society of kings," the major
+answered, with a great deal of dignity, "you would know that on the
+table of a monarch lead is much more rare than silver and gold. It was
+this fact that made me so overpoweringly valuable, and it is not
+surprising that a great many of the kings who used to come to these
+birthday parties should become envious of Fuzzywuz and wish they owned a
+treasure like myself. One very old king died of envy because of me, and
+his heir-apparent inherited his father's desire to possess me to such a
+degree that he too pined away and finally disappeared entirely. Just
+regularly faded out of sight. Didn't die, you know, as you would, but
+vanished.
+
+"So it went on for years, and finally on his sixty-fourth birthday King
+Fuzzywuz gave his usual party, and sixty-four of the choicest kings in
+the world were invited. They every one came, the feast was made ready,
+and just as the guests took their places around the table, the broth
+with me lying at the side of the tureen was brought in. The kings all
+took their crowns off in honor of my arrival, when suddenly pouf! a gust
+of wind came along and blew out every light in the hall. All was
+darkness, and in the midst of it I felt myself grabbed by the handle and
+shoved hastily into an entirely strange pocket.
+
+"'What, ho, without there!' cried Fuzzywuz. 'Turn off the wind and bring
+a light.'
+
+"The slaves hastened to do as they were told, and in less time than it
+takes to tell it, light and order were restored. And then a terrible
+scene ensued. I could see it very plainly through a button-hole in the
+cloak of the potentate who had seized me and hidden me in his pocket.
+Fuzzywuz immediately discovered that I was missing.
+
+"'What has become of our royal spoon?' he roared to the head-waiter,
+who, though he was an African of the blackest hue, turned white as a
+sheet with fear.
+
+"'It was in the broth, oh, Nepotic Fuzzywuz, King of the Desert and most
+noble Potentate of the Sand Dunes, when I, thy miserable servant,
+brought it into the gorgeous banqueting hall and set it here before
+thee, who art ever my most Serene and Egotistic Master,' returned the
+slave, trembling with fear and throwing himself flat upon the
+dining-hall floor.
+
+"'Caitiff!' cried the king. 'I believe thou hast played me false. Do
+spoons take wings unto themselves and fly away? Are they tadpoles that
+they develop legs and hop as frogs from our royal presence? Do spoons
+evapidate----'
+
+"'Evaporate, my dear,' suggested the queen in a whisper.
+
+"'Thanks,' returned the king. 'Do spoons evaporate like water in the
+sun? Do they raise sails like sloops of war and thunder noiselessly out
+of sight? No, no. Thou hast stolen it and thou must bear the penalty of
+thy predilection----'
+
+"'Dereliction,' whispered the queen, impatiently.
+
+"'He knows what I mean,' roared the king, 'or if he doesn't he will when
+his head is cut off.'"
+
+"Is that what all those big words meant?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"As I remember the occurrence, it is," returned the major. "What the
+king really meant was always uncertain; he always used such big words
+and rarely got them right. Reprehensibility and tremulousness were great
+favorites of his, though I don't believe he ever knew what they meant.
+But, to continue my story, at this point the king rose and sharpening
+the carving knife was about to behead the slave's head off when the
+potentate who had me in his pocket cried out:
+
+"'Hold, oh Fuzzywuz! The slave is right. I saw the spoon myself at the
+side of yon tureen when it was brought hither.'
+
+"'Then,' returned the king, 'it has been percolated----'
+
+"'Peculated,' whispered the queen.
+
+"'That's what I said,' retorted Fuzzywuz, angrily. 'The spoon has been
+speculated by some one of our royal brethren at this board. The point to
+be liquidated now is, who has done this deed. What, ho, without there! A
+guard about the palace gates--and lock the doors and bar the windows. We
+shall have a search. I am sorry to say, that every king in this room
+save only myself and my friend Prince Bigaroo, who at the risk of his
+kingly dignity deigned to come to the rescue of my slave, must repeal--I
+should say reveal--the contents of his pockets. Prince Bigaroo must be
+innocent or he would not have ejaculated as he hath.'
+
+"You see," said the major, in explanation, "Bigaroo having stolen me was
+smart enough to see how it would be if he spoke. A guilty person in nine
+cases out of ten would have kept silent and let the slave suffer. So
+Bigaroo escaped; but all the others were searched and of course I was
+not found. Fuzzywuz was wild with sorrow and anger, and declared that
+unless I was returned within ten minutes he would wage war upon, and
+utterly destroy, every king in the place. The kings all turned
+pale--even Bigaroo's cheek grew white, but having me he was determined
+to keep me and so the war began."
+
+"Why didn't you speak and save the innocent kings?" asked the sprite.
+
+"How could I?" retorted the major. "Did you ever see a spoon with a
+tongue?"
+
+The sprite made no answer. He evidently had never seen a spoon with a
+tongue.
+
+"The war was a terrible one," said the major, resuming his story. "One
+by one the kings were destroyed, and finally only Bigaroo remained, and
+Fuzzywuz not having found me in the treasures of the others, finally
+came to see that it was Bigaroo who had stolen me. So he turned his
+forces toward the wicked monarch, defeated his army, and set fire to his
+palace. In that fire I was destroyed as a souvenir spoon and became a
+lump of lead once more, lying in the ruins for nearly a thousand years,
+when I was sold along with a lot of iron and other things to a junk
+dealer. He in turn sold me to a ship-maker, who worked me over into a
+sounding lead for a steamer he had built. On my first trip out I was
+sent overboard to see how deep the ocean was. I fell in between two
+huge rocks down on the ocean's bed and was caught, the rope connecting
+me with the ship snapped, and there I was, twenty thousand fathoms under
+the sea, lost, as I supposed, forever. The effect of the salt water upon
+me was very much like that of hair restorer on some people's heads. I
+began to grow a head of green hair--seaweed some people call it--and to
+this fact, strangely enough, I owed my escape from the water. A sea-cow
+who used to graze about where I lay, thinking that I was only a tuft of
+grass gathered me in one afternoon and swallowed me without blinking,
+and some time after, the cow having been caught and killed by some giant
+fishermen, I was found by the wife of one of the men when the great cow
+was about to be cooked. These giants were very strange people who
+inhabited an island out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which was
+gradually sinking into the water with the weight of the people on it,
+and which has now entirely disappeared. There wasn't one of the
+inhabitants that was less than one hundred feet tall, and in those days
+they used to act as light-houses for each other at night. They had but
+one eye apiece, and when that was open it used to flash just like a
+great electric light, and they'd take turns at standing up in the
+middle of the island all night long and turning round and round and
+round until you'd think they'd drop with dizziness. I staid with these
+people, I should say, about forty years, when one morning two of the
+giants got disputing as to which of them could throw a stone the
+farthest. One of them said he could throw a pebble two thousand miles,
+and the other said he could throw one all the way round the world. At
+this the first one laughed and jeered, and to prove that he had told the
+truth the second grabbed up what he thought was a pebble, but which
+happened to be me and threw me from him with all his force."
+
+"Did you go all the way around?" queried Jimmieboy.
+
+"Did I? Well, rather. I went around once and a half. And sad to say I
+killed the giant who threw me," returned the major. "I went around the
+world so swiftly that when I got back to the island the poor fellow
+hadn't had time to get out of my way, and as I came whizzing along I
+struck him in the back, went right through him, and leaving him dead on
+the island went on again and finally fell into a great gun manufactory
+in Massachusetts where I was smelted over into a bullet, and sent to the
+war. I did lots of work for George Washington. I think I must have
+killed off half a dozen regiments of his enemies, and between you and
+me, General Washington said I was his favorite bullet, and added that as
+long as he had me with him he wasn't afraid of anybody."
+
+Here the major paused a minute to smile at the sprite who was beginning
+to look a little blue. It was rather plain, the sprite thought, that the
+major was getting the best of the duel.
+
+"Go on," said Jimmieboy. "What next? How long did you stay with George
+Washington?"
+
+"Six months," said the major. "I'd never have left him if he hadn't
+ordered me to do work that I wasn't made for. When a bullet goes to war
+he doesn't want to waste himself on ducks. I wanted to go after hostile
+generals and majors and cornet players, and if Mr. Washington had used
+me for them I'd have hit home every time, but instead of that he took me
+off duck shooting one day and actually asked me to knock over a
+miserable wild bird he happened to want. I rebelled at this. He
+insisted, and I said, 'very well, General, fire away.' He fired, the
+duck laughed, and I simply flew off into the woods on the border of the
+bay and rested there for nearly a hundred years. The rest of my story
+is soon told. I lay where I had fallen until six years ago when I was
+picked up by a small boy who used me for a sinker to go fishing with,
+after which I found my way into the smelting pot once more, and on the
+Fifteenth of November, 1892, I became what I am, Major Blueface, the
+handsomest soldier, the bravest warrior, the most talented tin poet that
+ever breathed."
+
+A long silence followed the completion of the major's story. Which of
+the two he liked the better Jimmieboy could not make up his mind, and he
+hoped his two companions would be considerate enough not to ask him to
+decide between them.
+
+"I thought they had to be true stories," said the sprite, gloomily. "I
+don't think it's fair to tell stories like yours--the idea of your being
+thrown one and a half times around the world!"
+
+"It's just as true as yours, anyhow," retorted the major, "but if you
+want to begin all over again and tell another I'm ready for you."
+
+"No," said the sprite. "We'll leave it to Jimmieboy as it is."
+
+"Then I win," said the major.
+
+"I don't know about that, major," said Jimmieboy. "I think you are just
+about even."
+
+"Do you really think so?" asked the sprite, his face beaming with
+pleasure.
+
+"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "We'll settle it this way: we'll give five points
+to the one who told the best, five points to the one who told the
+longest, and five points to the one who told the shortest story. As the
+stories are equally good you both get five points for that. The major's
+was the longest, I think, so he gets five more, but so does the sprite
+because his was the shortest. That makes you both ten, so you both win."
+
+"Hurrah!" cried the major. "Then I do win."
+
+"Yes," said the sprite, squeezing Jimmieboy's hand affectionately, "and
+so do I."
+
+Which after all, I think, was the best way to decide a duel of that
+sort.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+PLANNING A VISIT.
+
+
+"Well, now that that is settled," said the major with a sigh of relief,
+"I suppose we had better start off and see whether Fortyforefoot will
+attend to this business of getting the provisions for us."
+
+"Yes," said the sprite. "The major is right there, Jimmieboy. You have
+delayed so long on the way that it is about time you did something, and
+the only way I know of for you to do it is by getting hold of
+Fortyforefoot. If you wanted an apple pie and there was nothing in sight
+but a cart-wheel he would change it into an apple pie for you."
+
+"That's all very well," replied Jimmieboy, "but I'm not going to call on
+any giant who'd want to eat me. You might just as well understand that
+right off. I'll try on your invisible coat and if that makes me
+invisible I'll go. If it doesn't we'll have to try some other plan."
+
+"That is the prudent thing to do," said the major, nodding his approval
+to the little general. "As my poem tries to teach, it is always wise to
+use your eyes--or look before you leap. The way it goes is this:
+
+    'If you are asked to make a jump,
+     Be careful lest you prove a gump--
+         Awake or e'en in sleep--
+     Don't hesitate the slightest bit
+     To show that you've at least the wit
+         To look before you leap.
+
+     Why, in a dream one night, I thought
+     A fellow told me that I ought
+         To jump to Labrador.
+     I did not look but blindly hopped,
+     And where do you suppose I stopped?
+         Bang! On my bedroom floor!
+
+     I do not say, had I been wise
+     Enough that time to use my eyes--
+         As I've already said--
+     To Labrador I would have got:
+     But this _is_ certain, I would not
+         Have tumbled out of bed.'
+
+"The moral of which is, be careful how you go into things, and if you
+are not certain that you are coming out all right don't go into them,"
+added the major. "Why, when I was a mouse----"
+
+"Oh, come, major--you couldn't have been a mouse," interrupted the
+sprite. "You've just told us all about what you've been in the past, and
+you couldn't have been all that and a mouse too."
+
+"So I have," said the major, with a smile. "I'd forgotten that, and you
+are right, too. I couldn't have been a mouse. I should have put what I
+was going to say differently. If I had ever been a mouse--that's the way
+it should be--if I had ever been a mouse and had been foolish enough to
+stick my head into a mouse-trap after a piece of cheese without knowing
+that I should get it out again, I should not have been here to-day, in
+all likelihood. Therefore the general is right. Try on the invisible
+coat, Jimmieboy, and let's see how it works before you risk calling on
+Fortyforefoot."
+
+"Here it is," said the sprite, holding out his hands with apparently
+nothing in them.
+
+Jimmieboy laughed a little, it seemed so odd to have a person say "here
+it is" and yet not be able to see the object referred to. He reached out
+his hand, however, to take the coat, relying upon the sprite's statement
+that it was there, and was very much surprised to find that his hand did
+actually touch something that felt like a coat, and in fact was a coat,
+though entirely invisible.
+
+"Shall I help you on with it?" asked the major.
+
+"Perhaps you'd better," said Jimmieboy. "It feels a little small for
+me."
+
+"That's what I was afraid of," said the sprite. "You see it covers me
+all over from head to foot--that is the coat covers all but my head and
+the hood covers that--but you are very much taller than I am."
+
+Here Jimmieboy, having at last got into the coat and buttoned it about
+him, had the strange sensation of seeing all of himself disappear
+excepting his head and legs. These remaining uncovered were of course
+still in sight.
+
+"Ha-ha-ha!" laughed the major, merrily, as Jimmieboy walked around.
+"That is the most ridiculous thing I ever saw. You're nothing but a head
+and pair of legs."
+
+Jimmieboy smiled and placed the hood over his head and the major roared
+louder than ever.
+
+"Ha-ha-ha-ha!" he cried. "Oh, my--oh, dear! That's funnier still--now
+you're nothing but a pair of legs. Hee-hee-hee! Take it off quick or
+I'll die with laughter."
+
+Jimmieboy took off the hood.
+
+"I'm afraid it won't do, Spritey," he said. "Fortyforefoot would see my
+legs and if he caught them I'd be lost."
+
+"That's a fact," said the sprite, thoughtfully. "The coat is almost two
+feet too short for you."
+
+"It's more than two feet too short," laughed the major. "It's two whole
+legs too short."
+
+"This is no time for joking," said the sprite. "We've too much to talk
+about to use our mouths for laughing."
+
+"All right," said the major. "I won't get off any more, or if I do they
+won't be the kind to make you laugh. They will be sad jokes--like yours.
+But I say, boys," he added, "I have a scheme. It is of course the scheme
+of a soldier and may be attended by danger, but if it is successful all
+the more credit to the one who succeeds. We three people can attack
+Fortyforefoot openly, capture him, and not let him go until he provides
+us with the provisions."
+
+"That sounds lovely," sneered the sprite. "But I'd like to know some of
+the details of this scheme. It is easy enough to say attack him, capture
+him and not let him go, but the question is, how shall we do all this?"
+
+"It ought to be easy," returned the major. "There are only three things
+to be done. The first is to attack him. That certainly ought to be easy.
+A kitten can attack an elephant if it wants to. The second is to capture
+him, which, while it seems hard, is not really so if the attack is
+properly made. The third is not to let him go."
+
+"Clear as a fog," put in the sprite. "But go on."
+
+"Now there are three of us--Jimmieboy, Spriteyboy and Yourstrulyboy,"
+continued the major, "so what could be more natural than that we should
+divide up these three operations among us? Nothing! Therefore I propose
+that Jimmieboy here shall attack Fortyforefoot; the sprite shall capture
+him and throw him into a dungeon cell and I will crown the work by not
+letting him go."
+
+"Magnificent!" said the sprite. "Jimmieboy and I take all the danger I
+notice."
+
+"Yes," returned the major. "I am utterly unselfish about
+it. I am willing to put myself in the background and let you have all
+the danger and most of the glory. I only come in at the very end--but I
+don't mind that. I have had glory enough for ten life-times, so why
+should I grudge you this one little bit of it? My feelings in regard to
+glory will be found on the fortieth page of Leaden Lyrics or the Ballads
+of Ben Bullet--otherwise myself. The verses read as follows:
+
+    'Though glory, it must be confessed,
+       Is satisfying stuff,
+     Upon my laurels let me rest
+       For I have had enough.
+
+     Ne'er was a glorier man than I,
+       Ne'er shall a glorier be,
+     Than, trembling reader, you'll espy--
+       When haply you spy me.
+
+     So bring no more--for while 'tis good
+       To have, 'tis also plain
+     A bit of added glory would
+       Be apt to make me vain.'
+
+And I don't want to be vain," concluded the major.
+
+"Well, I don't want any of your glory," said the sprite, "and if I know
+Jimmieboy I don't think he does either. If you want to reverse your
+order of things and do the dangerous part of the work yourself, we will
+do all in our power to make your last hours comfortable, and I will see
+to it that the newspapers tell how bravely you died, but we can't go
+into the scheme any other way."
+
+"You talk as if you were the general's prime minister, or his nurse,"
+retorted the major, "whereas in reality I, being his chief of staff, am
+they if anybody are."
+
+Here the major blushed a little because he was not quite sure of his
+grammar. Neither of his companions seemed to notice the mixture,
+however, and so he continued:
+
+"General, it is for you to say. Shall my plan go or shall she stay?"
+
+"Well, I think myself, major, that it is a little too dangerous for me,
+and if any other plan could be made I'd like it better," answered
+Jimmieboy, anxious to soothe the major's feelings which were evidently
+getting hurt again. "Suppose I go back and order the soldiers to attack
+Fortyforefoot and bring him in chains to me?"
+
+"Couldn't be done," said the sprite. "The minute the chains were clapped
+on him he would change them into doughnuts and eat them all up."
+
+"Yes," put in the major, "and the chances are he would turn the soldiers
+into a lot of toy balloons on a string and then cut the string."
+
+"He couldn't do that," said the sprite, "because he can't turn people or
+animals into anything. His power only applies to things."
+
+"Then what shall we do?" said Jimmieboy, in despair.
+
+"Well, I think the best thing to do would be for me to change myself
+into a giant bigger than he is," said the sprite. "Then I could put you
+and the major in my pockets and call upon Fortyforefoot and ask him, in
+a polite way, to turn some pebbles and sticks and other articles into
+the things we want, and, if he won't do it except he is paid, we'll pay
+him if we can."
+
+"What do you propose to pay him with?" asked the major. "I suppose
+you'll hand him half a dozen checkerberries and tell him if he'll turn
+them into ten one dollar bills he'll have ten dollars. Fine way to do
+business that."
+
+"No," said the sprite, mildly. "You can't tempt Fortyforefoot with
+money. It is only by offering him something to eat that we can hope to
+get his assistance."
+
+"Ah? And you'll request him to turn a handful of pine cones into a dozen
+turkeys on toast, I presume?" asked the major.
+
+"I shall do nothing of the sort. I shall simply offer to let him have
+you for dinner--you will serve up well in croquettes--Blueface
+croquettes--eh, Jimmieboy?" laughed the sprite.
+
+The poor major turned white with fear and rage. At first he felt
+inclined to slay the sprite on the spot, and then it suddenly flashed
+across his mind that before he could do it the sprite might really turn
+himself into a giant and do with him as he had said. So he contented
+himself with turning pale and giving a sickly smile.
+
+"That would be a good joke on me," he said. "But really, my dear Mr.
+Sprite, I don't think I would enjoy it, and after all I have a sort of
+notion that I would disagree with Fortyforefoot--which would be
+extremely unfortunate. I know I should rest like lead on his
+digestion--and that would make him angry with you and I should be
+sacrificed for nothing."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't consent to that anyhow," said Jimmieboy. "I love the
+major too much to----"
+
+"So do we all," interrupted the sprite. "Why even I love the major and I
+wouldn't let anybody eat him for anything--no, sir!--not if I were
+offered a whole vanilla eclaire would I permit the major to be eaten.
+But my scheme is the only one possible. I will turn myself into a giant
+twice as big as Fortyforefoot; I will place you and the major in my
+pockets and then I will call upon him. He will be so afraid of me that
+he will do almost anything I ask him to, but to make him give us the
+very best things he can make I would rather deal gently with him, and
+instead of forcing him to make the peaches and cherries I'll offer to
+trade you two fellows off for the things we need. He will be pleased
+enough at the chance to get anything so good to eat as you look, and
+he'll prepare everything for us, and he will put you down stairs in the
+pantry. Then I will tell him stories, and some of the major's jokes, to
+make him sleepy, and when finally he dozes off I will steal the pantry
+key and set you free. How does that strike you, general?"
+
+"It's a very good plan unless Fortyforefoot should find us so toothsome
+looking that he would want to eat us raw. We may be nothing more than
+fruit for him, you know, and truly I don't want to be anybody's apple,"
+said Jimmieboy.
+
+"You are quite correct there, general," said the major, with a chuckle.
+"In fact, I'm quite sure he'd think you and I were fruit because being
+two we are necessarily a pear."
+
+"It won't happen," said the sprite. "He isn't likely to think you are
+fruit and even if he does I won't let him eat you. I'll keep him from
+doing it if I have to eat you myself."
+
+"Oh, of course, then, with a kind promise like that there is nothing
+left for us to do but accept your proposition," said the
+major. "As Ben Bullet says:
+
+    'When only one thing can be done--
+       If people only knew it--
+     The wisest course beneath the sun
+       Is just to go and do it.'"
+
+"I'm willing to take my chances," said Jimmieboy, "if after I see what
+kind of a giant you can turn yourself into I think you are terrible
+enough to frighten another giant."
+
+"Well, just watch me," said the sprite, taking off his coat. "And mind,
+however terrifying I may become, don't you get frightened, because I
+won't hurt you."
+
+"Go ahead," said the major, valiantly. "Wait until we get scared before
+talking like that to us."
+
+"One, two, three!" cried the sprite. "Presto! Change!
+
+    'Bazam, bazam,
+     A sprite I am,
+     Bazoo, bazee,
+     A giant I'd be.'"
+
+Then there came a terrific noise; the trees about the little group shook
+to the very last end of their roots, all grew dark as night, and as
+quickly grew light again. In the returning light Jimmieboy saw looming
+up before him a fearful creature, eighty feet high, clad in a
+magnificent suit embroidered with gold and silver, a fierce mustache
+upon his lip, and dangling at his side was a heavy sword.
+
+It was the sprite now transformed into a giant--a terrible-looking
+fellow, though to Jimmieboy he was not terrible because the boy knew
+that the dreadful creature was only his little friend in disguise.
+
+"How do I look?" came a bellowing voice from above the trees.
+
+"First rate. Horribly frightful. I'm sure you'll do, and I am ready,"
+said Jimmieboy, with a laugh. "What do you think, major?"
+
+But there came no answer, and Jimmieboy, looking about him to see why
+the major made no reply, was just in time to see that worthy soldier's
+coat-tails disappearing down the road.
+
+The major was running away as fast as he could go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+IN FORTYFOREFOOT VALLEY.
+
+
+"You've frightened him pretty well, Spritey," said Jimmieboy, with a
+laugh, as the major passed out of sight.
+
+"Yes," returned the sprite. "But you don't seem a bit afraid."
+
+"I'm not--though I think I should be if I didn't know who you are,"
+returned Jimmieboy. "You are really a pretty hideous affair."
+
+"Well, I need to be if I am to get the best of Fortyforefoot, but, I
+say, you mustn't call me Spritey now that I am a giant. It won't do to
+call me by any name that would show Fortyforefoot who I really am," said
+the sprite, with a warning shake of his head.
+
+"But what shall I call you?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"Bludgeonhead is my name now," replied the sprite. "Benjamin B.
+Bludgeonhead is my full name, but you know me well enough to call me
+plain Bludgeonhead."
+
+"All right, plain Bludgeonhead," said Jimmieboy, "I'll do as you
+say--and now don't you think we'd better be starting along?"
+
+"Yes," said Bludgeonhead, reaching down and grabbing hold of Jimmieboy
+with his huge hand. "We'll start right away, and until we come in sight
+of Fortyforefoot's house I think perhaps you'll be more comfortable if
+you ride on my shoulder instead of in my coat-pocket."
+
+"Thank you very much," said Jimmieboy, as Bludgeonhead lifted him up
+from the ground and set him lightly as a feather on his shoulder. "My,
+what a view!" he added, as he gazed about him. "I think I'd like to be
+as tall as this all the time, Bludgeonhead. What a great thing it would
+be on parade days to be as tall as this. Why I can see miles and miles
+of country from here."
+
+"Yes, it's pretty fine--but I don't think I'd care to be so tall
+always," returned Bludgeonhead, as he stepped over a great broad river
+that lay in his path. "It makes one very uppish to be as high in the air
+as this; and you'd be all the time looking down on your friends, too,
+which would be so unpleasant for your friends that they wouldn't have
+anything to do with you after a while. Hang on tight now. I'm going to
+jump over this mountain in front of us."
+
+Here Bludgeonhead drew back a little and then took a short run, after
+which he leaped high in the air, and he and Jimmieboy sailed easily over
+the great hills before them, and then alighted safe and sound on the
+other side.
+
+"That was just elegant!" cried Jimmieboy, clapping his hands with glee.
+"I hope there are lots more hills like that to be jumped over."
+
+"No, there aren't," said Bludgeonhead, "but if you like it so much I'll
+go back and do it again."
+
+"Let's," said Jimmieboy.
+
+Bludgeonhead turned back and jumped over the mountain half a dozen times
+until Jimmieboy was satisfied and then he resumed his journey.
+
+"This," he said, after trudging along in silence for some time, "this is
+Fortyforefoot Valley, and in a short time we shall come to the giant's
+castle; but meanwhile I want you to see what a wonderful place this is.
+The valley itself will give you a better idea of Fortyforefoot's great
+power as a magician than anything else that I know of. Do you know what
+this place was before he came here?"
+
+"No," said Jimmieboy. "What was it?"
+
+"It was a great big hole in the ground," returned Bludgeonhead. "A
+regular sand pit. Fortyforefoot liked the situation because it was
+surrounded by mountains and nobody ever wanted to come here because sand
+pits aren't worth visiting. There wasn't a tree or a speck of a green
+thing anywhere in sight--nothing but yellow sand glaring in the sun all
+day and sulking in the moon all night."
+
+"Why how could that be? It's all covered with beautiful trees and
+gardens and brooks now," said Jimmieboy, which was quite true, for the
+Fortyforefoot Valley was a perfect paradise to look at, filled with
+everything that was beautiful in the way of birds and trees and flowers
+and water courses. "How could he make the trees and flowers grow in dry
+hot sand like that?"
+
+"By his magic power, of course," answered Bludgeonhead. "He filled up a
+good part of the sand pit with stones that he found about here, and then
+he changed one part of the desert into a pond so that he could get all
+the water he wanted. Then he took a square mile of sand and changed
+every grain of it into blades of grass. Other portions he transformed
+into forests until finally simply by the wonderful power he has to
+change one thing into another he got the place into its present shape."
+
+"But the birds, how did he make them?" asked the little general.
+
+"He didn't," said Bludgeonhead. "They came of their own accord. They saw
+what a beautiful place this was and they simply moved in."
+
+Bludgeonhead paused a moment in his walk and set Jimmieboy down on the
+ground again.
+
+"I think I'll take a rest here before going on. We are very near to
+Fortyforefoot's castle now," he said. "I'll sit down here for a few
+moments and sharpen my sword and get in good shape for a fight if one
+becomes necessary. Don't wander away, Jimmieboy. This place is full of
+traps for just such fellows as you who come in here. That's the way
+Fortyforefoot catches them for dinner."
+
+So Jimmieboy staid close by Bludgeonhead's side and was very much
+entertained by all that went on around him. He saw the most wonderful
+birds imaginable, and great bumble-bees buzzed about in the flowers
+gathering honey by the quart. Once a great jack-rabbit, three times as
+large as he was, came rushing out of the woods toward him, and Jimmieboy
+on stooping to pick up a stone to throw at Mr. Bunny to frighten him
+away, found that all the stones in that enchanted valley were precious.
+He couldn't help laughing outright when he discovered that the stone he
+had thrown at the rabbit was a huge diamond as big as his fist, and that
+even had he stopped to choose a less expensive missile he would have had
+to confine his choice to pearls, rubies, emeralds, and other gems of the
+rarest sort. And then he noticed that what he thought was a rock upon
+which he and Bludgeonhead were sitting was a massive nugget of pure
+yellow gold. This lead him on to inspect the trees about him and then he
+discovered a most absurd thing. Fortyforefoot's extravagance had
+prompted him to make all his pine trees of the most beautifully polished
+and richly inlaid mahogany; every one of the weeping willows was made of
+solid oak, ornamented and carved until the eye wearied of its beauty,
+and as for the birds in the trees, their nests were made not of stray
+wisps of straw and hay stolen from the barns and fields, but of the
+softest silk, rich in color and lined throughout with eiderdown, the
+mere sight of which could hardly help being restful to a tired bird--or
+boy either, for that matter, Jimmieboy thought.
+
+"Did he make all this out of sand? All these jewels and magnificent
+carvings?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Bludgeonhead. "Simply took up a handful of sand and tossed
+it up in the air and whatever he commanded it to be it became. But the
+most wonderful thing in this place is his spring. He made what you might
+call a 'Wish Dipper' out of an old tin cup. Then he dug a hole and
+filled it with sand which he commanded to become liquid, and, when the
+sand heard him say that, it turned to liquid, but the singular thing
+about it is that as Fortyforefoot didn't say what kind of liquid it
+should be, it became any kind. So now if any one is thirsty and wants a
+glass of cider all he has to do is to dip the wish dipper into the
+spring and up comes cider. If he wants lemonade up comes lemonade. If he
+wants milk up comes milk. It's simply great."
+
+As Bludgeonhead spoke these words Jimmieboy was startled to hear
+something very much like an approaching footstep far down the road.
+
+"Did you hear that?" he asked, seizing Bludgeonhead by the hand.
+
+"Yes, I did," replied Bludgeonhead, in a whisper. "It sounded to me like
+Fortyforefoot's step, too."
+
+"I'd better hide, hadn't I?" said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes," said Bludgeonhead. "Come here and be quick about it. Climb inside
+my coat and snuggle down out of sight in my pocket. We musn't let him
+see you yet awhile."
+
+Jimmieboy did as he was commanded, and found the pocket a very
+comfortable place, only it was a little stuffy.
+
+"It's pretty hot in here," he whispered.
+
+"Well, look up on the left hand corner of the outer side of the pocket
+and you'll find two flaps that are buttoned up," replied Bludgeonhead,
+softly. "Unbutton them. One will let in all the air you want, and the
+other will enable you to peep out and see Fortyforefoot without his
+seeing you."
+
+In a minute the buttons were found and the flaps opened. Everything
+happened as Bludgeonhead said it would, and in a minute Jimmieboy,
+peering out through the hole in the cloak, saw Fortyforefoot
+approaching.
+
+The owner of the beautiful valley seemed very angry when he caught sight
+of Bludgeonhead sitting on his property, and hastening up to him, he
+cried:
+
+"What business have you here in the Valley of Fortyforefoot?"
+
+Jimmieboy shrank back into one corner of the pocket, a little overcome
+with fear. Fortyforefoot was larger and more terrible than he thought.
+
+"I am not good at riddles," said Bludgeonhead, calmly. "That is at
+riddles of that sort. If you had asked me the difference between a duck
+and a garden rake I should have told you that a duck has no teeth and
+can eat, while a rake has plenty of teeth and can't eat. But when you
+ask me what business I have here I am forced to say that I can't say."
+
+"You are a very bright sort of a giant," sneered Fortyforefoot.
+
+"Yes," replied Bludgeonhead. "The fact is I can't help being bright. My
+mother polishes me every morning with a damp chamois."
+
+"Do you know to whom you are speaking?" asked Fortyforefoot,
+threateningly.
+
+"No; not having been introduced to you, I can't say I know you,"
+returned Bludgeonhead. "But I think I can guess. You are Anklehigh, the
+Dwarf."
+
+At this Fortyforefoot turned purple with rage.
+
+"Anklehigh the Dwarf?" he roared. "I'll right quickly teach thee a
+lesson thou rash fellow."
+
+Fortyforefoot strode up close to Bludgeonhead, whose size he could not
+have guessed because Bludgeonhead had been sitting down all this time
+and was pretty well covered over by his cloak.
+
+[Illustration: BLUDGEONHEAD SHOWS JIMMIEBOY TO FORTYFOREFOOT. PAGE
+174.]
+
+[Blank Page]
+
+"I'll take thee by thine ear and toss thee to the moon," he cried,
+reaching out his hand to make good his word.
+
+"Nonsense, Anklehigh," returned Bludgeonhead, calmly. "Don't be foolish.
+No dwarf can fight with a giant of my size."
+
+"But I am not the dwarf Anklehigh," shrieked Fortyforefoot. "I am
+Fortyforefoot."
+
+"And I am Bludgeonhead," returned the other, rising and towering way
+above the owner of the valley.
+
+"Mercy sakes!" cried Fortyforefoot, falling on his knees in abject
+terror. "He'd make six of me! Pardon, O, Bludgeonhead. I did not know
+you when I was so hasty as to offer to throw you to the moon. I thought
+you were--er--that you were--er----"
+
+"More easily thrown," suggested Bludgeonhead.
+
+"Yes--yes--that was it," stammered Fortyforefoot. "And now, to show that
+you have forgiven me, I want you to come to my castle and have dinner
+with me."
+
+"I'll be very glad to," replied Bludgeonhead. "What are you going to
+have for dinner?"
+
+"Anything you wish," said Fortyforefoot. "I was going to have a very
+plain dinner to-night because for to-morrow's dinner I have invited my
+brother Fortythreefoot and his wife Fortytwoinch to have a little
+special dish I have been so fortunate as to secure."
+
+"Ah?" said Bludgeonhead. "And what is that dish, pray?"
+
+"Oh, only a sniveling creature I caught in one of my traps this
+afternoon. He was a soldier, and he wasn't very brave about being
+caught, but I judge from looking at him that he will make good eating,"
+said Fortyforefoot. "I couldn't gather from him who he was. He had on a
+military uniform, but he behaved less like a warrior than ever I
+supposed a man could. It seems from his story that he was engaged upon
+some secret mission, and on his way back to his army, he stumbled over
+and into one of my game traps where I found him. He begged me to let him
+go, but that was out of the question. I haven't had a soldier to eat for
+four years, so I took him to the castle, had him locked up in the
+ice-box, and to-morrow we shall eat him."
+
+"Did he tell you his name?" asked Bludgeonhead, thoughtfully.
+
+"He tried to but didn't succeed. He told me so many names that I didn't
+believe he really owned any of them," said Fortyforefoot. "All I could
+really learn about him was that he was as brave as a lion, and that if I
+would spare him he would write me a poem a mile long every day of my
+life."
+
+"Very attractive offer, that," said Bludgeonhead, with a smile.
+
+"Yes; but I couldn't do it. I wouldn't miss eating him for anything,"
+replied Fortyforefoot, smacking his lips, hungrily. "I'd give anything
+anybody'd ask, too, if I could find another as good."
+
+"Would you, honestly?" asked Bludgeonhead. "Well, now, I thought you
+would, and that is really what I have come here for. I have in my pocket
+here a real live general that I have captured. Now between you and me, I
+don't eat generals. I don't care for them--they fight so. I prefer
+preserved cherries and pickled peaches and--er--strawberry jam and
+powdered sugar and almonds, and other things like that, you know, and it
+occurred to me that if I let you have the general you would supply me
+with what I needed of the others."
+
+"You have come to the right place, Bludgeonhead," said Fortyforefoot,
+eagerly. "I'll give you a million cans of jam, all the pickled peaches
+and other things you can carry if this general you speak about is a fine
+specimen."
+
+"Well, here he is," said Bludgeonhead, hauling Jimmieboy out of his
+pocket--whispering to Jimmieboy at the same time not to be afraid
+because he wouldn't let anything happen to him, and so of course
+Jimmieboy felt perfectly safe, though a little excited.
+
+"Beautiful!" cried Fortyforefoot. "Superb! Got any more?"
+
+"No," answered Bludgeonhead, putting Jimmieboy back into his pocket
+again. "If I ever do find another, though, you shall have him."
+
+This of course put Fortyforefoot in a tremendously good humor, and
+before an hour had passed he had not only transformed pebbles and twigs
+and leaves of trees and other small things into the provisions that the
+tin soldiers needed, but he had also furnished horses and wagons enough
+to carry them back to headquarters, and then Fortyforefoot accompanied
+by Bludgeonhead entered the castle, where the proprietor demanded that
+Jimmieboy should be given up to him.
+
+Bludgeonhead handed him over at once, and ten minutes later Jimmieboy
+found himself locked up in the pantry.
+
+Hardly had he time to think over the strange events of the afternoon
+when he heard a noise in the ice-box over in one corner of the pantry,
+and on going there to see what was the cause of it he heard a familiar
+voice repeating over and over again these mournful lines:
+
+    "From Giant number one I ran--
+       But O the sequel dire!
+     I truly left a frying-pan
+       And jumped into a fire."
+
+"Hullo in there," whispered Jimmieboy. "Who are you?"
+
+"The bravest man of my time," replied the voice in the ice-box. "Major
+Mortimer Carraway Blueface of the 'Jimmieboy Guards.'"
+
+"Oh, I am so glad to find you again," cried Jimmieboy, throwing open the
+ice-box door. "I thought it was you the minute I heard your poetry."
+
+"Ah!" said the major, with a sad smile. "You recognized the beauty of
+the poem?"
+
+"Not exactly," said Jimmieboy. "But you said you were in the fire when I
+knew you were in the ice-box, and so of course----"
+
+"Of course," said the major, with a frown. "You remembered that when I
+say one thing I mean another. Well, I'm glad to see you again, but why
+did you desert me so cruelly?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE RESCUE.
+
+
+For a moment Jimmieboy could say nothing, so surprised was he at the
+major's question. Then he simply repeated it, his amazement very evident
+in the tone of his voice.
+
+"Why did we desert you so cruelly?"
+
+"Yes," returned the major. "I'd like to know. When two of my companions
+in arms leave me, the way you and old Spriteyboy did, I think you ought
+to make some explanation. It was mean and cruel."
+
+"But we didn't desert you," said Jimmieboy. "No such idea ever entered
+our minds. It was you who deserted us."
+
+"I?" roared the major fiercely.
+
+"Certainly," said Jimmieboy calmly. "You. The minute Spritey turned into
+Bludgeonhead you ran away just about as fast as your tin legs could
+carry you--frightened to death evidently."
+
+"Jimmieboy," said the major, his voice husky with emotion, "any other
+person than yourself would have had to fight a duel with me for casting
+such a doubt as you have just cast upon my courage. The idea of me, of
+I, of myself, Major Mortimer Carraway Blueface, the hero of a hundred
+and eighty-seven real sham fights, the most poetic as well as the
+handsomest man in the 'Jimmieboy Guards' being accused of running away!
+Oh! It is simply dreadful!
+
+    "I've been accused of dreadful things,
+     Of wearing copper finger-rings,
+     Of eating green peas with a spoon,
+     Of wishing that I owned the moon,
+     Of telling things that weren't the truth,
+     Of having cut no wisdom tooth,
+     In times of war of stealing buns,
+     And fainting at the sound of guns,
+     Yet never dreamed I'd see the day
+     When it was thought I'd run away.
+     Alack--O--well-a-day--alas!
+     That this should ever come to pass!
+     Alas--O--well-a-day--alack!
+     It knocks me flat upon my back.
+     Alas--alack--O--well-a-day!
+     It fills me full of sore dismay.
+     Aday--alas--O--lack-a-well--"
+
+"Are you going to keep that up forever?" asked Jimmieboy. "If you are
+I'm going to get out. I've heard stupid poetry in this campaign, but
+that's the worst yet."
+
+"I only wanted to show you what I could do in the way of a lamentation,"
+said the major. "If you've had enough I'll stop of course; but tell me,"
+he added, sitting down upon a cake of ice, and crossing his legs, "how
+on earth did you ever get hold of the ridiculous notion that I ran away
+frightened?"
+
+"How?" ejaculated Jimmieboy. "What else was there to think? The minute
+the sprite was changed into Bludgeonhead I turned to speak to you, and
+all I could see of you was your coat-tails disappearing around the
+corner way down the road."
+
+"And just because my coat-tails behaved like that you put me down as a
+coward?" groaned the major.
+
+"Didn't you run away?" Jimmieboy asked.
+
+"Of course not," replied the major. "That is, not exactly. I hurried
+off; but not because I was afraid. I was simply going down the road to
+see if I couldn't find a looking-glass so that Spriteyboy could see how
+he looked as a giant."
+
+Jimmieboy laughed.
+
+"That's a magnificent excuse," he said.
+
+"I thought you'd think it was," said the major, with a pleased smile.
+"And when I finally found that there weren't any mirrors to be had
+along the road I went back, and you two had gone and left me."
+
+"And what did you do then?" asked Jimmieboy.
+
+"I wrote a poem on sleep. It's a great thing, sleep is, and I wrote the
+lines off in two tenths of a fifth of a second. As I remember it, this
+is the way they went:
+
+    "SLEEP.
+
+     Deserted by my friends I sit,
+       And silently I weep,
+     Until I'm wearied so by it,
+     I lose my little store of wit;
+       I nod and fall asleep.
+
+     Then in my dreams my friends I spy--
+       Once more are they my own.
+     I cease to murmur and to cry,
+     For then 'tis sure to be that I
+       Forget I am alone.
+
+     'Tis hence I think that sleep's the best
+       Of friends that man has got--
+      Not only does it bring him rest
+     But makes him feel that he is blest
+       With blessings he has not."
+
+"Why didn't you go to sleep if you felt that way?" said Jimmieboy.
+
+"I wanted to find you and I hadn't time. There was only time for me to
+scratch that poem off on my mind and start to find you and Bludgeyboy,"
+replied the major.
+
+"His name isn't Bludgeyboy," said Jimmieboy, with a smile. "It's
+Bludgeonhead."
+
+"Oh, yes, I forgot," said the major. "It's a good name, too,
+Bludgeonpate is."
+
+"How did you come to be captured by Fortyforefoot?" asked Jimmieboy,
+after he had decided not to try to correct the major any more as to
+Bludgeonhead's name.
+
+"There you go again!" cried the major, angrily. "The idea of a miserable
+ogre like Fortyforefoot capturing me, the most sagacitacious soldier of
+modern times. I suppose you think I fell into one of his game traps?"
+
+"That's what he said," said Jimmieboy. "He said you acted in a very
+curious way, too--promised him all sorts of things if he'd let you go."
+
+"That's just like those big, bragging giants," said the major. "The
+idea! why he didn't capture me at all. I came here of my own free will
+and accord."
+
+"What? Down here into this pantry and into the ice-chest? Oh, come now,
+major. You can't fool me," said Jimmieboy. "That's nonsense. Why should
+you want to come here?"
+
+"To meet you, of course," retorted the major. "That's why. I knew it
+was part of your scheme to come here. You and I were to be put into the
+pantry and then old Bludgeyhat was to come and rescue us. I was the one
+to make the scheme, wasn't I?"
+
+"No. It was Bludgeonhead," said Jimmieboy, who didn't know whether to
+believe the major or not.
+
+"That's just the way," said the major, indignantly, "he gets all the
+credit just because he's big and I don't get any, and yet if you knew of
+all the wild animals I've killed to get here to you, how I met
+Fortyforefoot and bound him hand and foot and refused to let him go
+unless he would permit me to spend a week in his ice-chest, for the sole
+and only purpose that I wished to meet you again, you'd change your mind
+mighty quick about me."
+
+"You bound Fortyforefoot? A little two-inch fellow like you?" said
+Jimmieboy.
+
+"Why not?" asked the major. "Did you ever see me in a real sham battle?"
+
+"No, I never did," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Well, you'd better never," returned the major, "unless you want to be
+frightened out of your wits. I have been called the living telescope,
+sir, because when I begin to fight, in the fiercest manner possible, I
+sort of lengthen out and sprout up into the air until I am taller than
+any foe within my reach."
+
+"Really?" queried Jimmieboy, with a puzzled air about him.
+
+"Do you doubt it?" asked the major.
+
+"Well, I should like to see it once," said Jimmieboy. "Then I might
+believe it."
+
+"Then you will never believe it," returned the major, "because you will
+never see it. I never fight in the presence of others, sir."
+
+As the major spoke these words a heavy footstep was heard on the stairs.
+
+"What is that?" cried the major, springing to his feet.
+
+    "I do not ask you for your gold,
+       Nor for an old straw hat--
+     I simply ask that I be told
+       Oh what, oh what is that?"
+
+"It is a footstep on the stairs," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" moaned the major "If it is Fortyforefoot all is
+over for us. This is what I feared.
+
+    "I was afraid he could not wait,
+       The miserable sinner,
+     To serve me up in proper state
+       At his to-morrow's dinner.
+
+     Alas, he comes I greatly fear
+       In search of Major Me, sir,
+     And that he'll wash me down with beer
+       This very night at tea, sir."
+
+"Oh, why did I come here--why----"
+
+"I shall!" roared a voice out in the passage-way.
+
+"You shall not," roared another voice, which Jimmieboy was delighted to
+recognize as Bludgeonhead's.
+
+"I am hungry," said the first voice, "and what is mine is my own to do
+with as I please. I shall eat both of them at once. Stand aside!"
+
+"I will toss you into the air, my dear Fortyforefoot," returned
+Bludgeonhead's voice, "if you advance another step; and with such force,
+sir, that you will never come down again."
+
+"Tut, tut! I am not so easily tossed. Stand aside," roared the voice of
+Fortyforefoot.
+
+The two prisoners in the pantry heard a tremendous scuffling, a crash,
+and a loud laugh.
+
+Then Bludgeonhead's voice was heard again.
+
+"Good-by, Fortyforefoot," it cried.
+
+"I hope he is not going to leave us," whispered Jimmieboy, but the major
+was too frightened to speak, and he trembled so that half a dozen times
+he fell off the ice-cake that he had been sitting on.
+
+"Give my love to the moon when you pass her, and when you get up into
+the milky way turn half a million of the stars there into baked apples
+and throw 'em down to me," called Bludgeonhead's voice.
+
+"If you'll only lasso me and pull me back I'll do anything you want me
+to," came the voice of Fortyforefoot from some tremendous height, it
+seemed to Jimmieboy.
+
+"Not if I know it," replied Bludgeonhead, with a laugh. "I think I'd
+like to settle down here myself as the owner of Fortyforefoot Valley.
+Good-bye."
+
+Whatever answer was made to this it was too indistinct for Jimmieboy to
+hear, and in a minute the key of the pantry door was turned, the door
+thrown open, and Bludgeonhead stood before them.
+
+"You are free," he said, grasping Jimmieboy's hand and squeezing it
+affectionately. "But I had to get rid of him. It was the only way to do
+it. He wanted to eat you right away."
+
+"And did you really throw him off into the air?" asked Jimmieboy, as he
+walked out into the hall.
+
+"Yes," said Bludgeonhead. "See that hole in the roof?" he added,
+pointing upward.
+
+"My!" ejaculated Jimmieboy, as he glanced upward and saw a huge rent in
+the ceiling, through which, gradually rising and getting smaller and
+smaller the further he rose, was to be seen the unfortunate
+Fortyforefoot. "Did he go through there?"
+
+"Yes," replied Bludgeonhead. "I simply picked him up and tossed him over
+my head. He'll never come back. I shall turn myself into Fortyforefoot
+and settle down here forever, only instead of being a bad giant I shall
+be a good one--but hallo! Who is this?"
+
+The major had crawled out of the ice-chest and was now trying to appear
+calm, although his terrible fright still left him trembling so that he
+could hardly speak.
+
+"It is Major Blueface," said Jimmieboy, with a smile.
+
+"Oh!" cried Bludgeonhead. "He was Fortyforefoot's other prisoner."
+
+"N--nun--not at--t--at--at all," stammered the major. "I
+def--fuf--feated him in sus--single combat."
+
+"But what are you trembling so for now?" demanded Bludgeonhead.
+
+"I--I am--m not tut--trembling," retorted the major. "I--I am o--only
+sh--shivering with--th--the--c--c--c--cold. I--I--I've bub--been in
+th--that i--i--i--ice bu--box sus--so long."
+
+Jimmieboy and Bludgeonhead roared with laughter at this. Then giving the
+major a warm coat to put on they sent him up stairs to lie down and
+recover his nerves.
+
+After the major had been attended to, Bludgeonhead changed himself back
+into the sprite again, and he and Jimmieboy sauntered in and out among
+the gardens for an hour or more and were about returning to the castle
+for supper when they heard sounds of music. There was evidently a brass
+band coming up the road. In an instant they hid themselves behind a
+tree, from which place of concealment they were delighted two or three
+minutes later to perceive that the band was none other than that of the
+"Jimmieboy Guards," and that behind it, in splendid military form,
+appeared Colonel Zinc followed by the tin soldiers themselves.
+
+"Hurrah!" cried Jimmieboy, throwing his cap into the air.
+
+"Ditto!" roared the sprite.
+
+"The same!" shrieked the colonel, waving his sword with delight, and
+commanding his regiment to halt, as he caught sight of Jimmieboy.
+
+[Illustration: BLUDGEONHEAD COMES TO THE RESCUE. PAGE 187.]
+
+[Blank Page]
+
+"Us likewise!" cheered the soldiers: following which came a trembling
+voice from one of the castle windows which said:
+
+    "I also wish to add my cheer
+       Upon this happy day;
+     And if you'll kindly come up here
+       You'll hear me cry 'Hooray.'"
+
+"It's Major Blueface's voice!" cried the colonel. "Is the major ill?"
+
+"No," said the sprite, motioning to Jimmieboy not to betray the major.
+"Only a little worn-out by the fight we have had with Fortyforefoot."
+
+"With Fortyforefoot?" echoed the colonel.
+
+"Yes," said the sprite, modestly. "We three have got rid of him at
+last."
+
+"Then the victory is won!" cried the colonel. "Do you know who
+Fortyforefoot really was?"
+
+"No; who?" asked Jimmieboy, his curiosity aroused.
+
+"The Parallelopipedon himself," said the colonel. "We found that out
+last night, and fearing that he might have captured our general and our
+major we came here to besiege him in his castle and rescue our
+officers."
+
+"But I don't see how Fortyforefoot could have been the
+Parallelopipedon," said Jimmieboy. "What would he want to be him for,
+when, all he had to do to get anything he wanted was to take sand and
+turn it into it?"
+
+"Ah, but don't you see," explained the colonel, "there was one thing he
+never could do as Fortyforefoot. The law prevented him from leaving this
+valley here in any other form than that of the Parallelopipedon. He
+didn't mind his confinement to the valley very much at first, but after
+a while he began to feel cooped up here, and then he took an old packing
+box and made it look as much like a living Parallelopipedon as he could.
+Then he got into it whenever he wanted to roam about the world. Probably
+if you will search the castle you will find the cast-off shell he used
+to wear, and if you do I hope you will destroy it, because it is said to
+be a most horrible spectacle--frightening animals to death and causing
+every flower within a mile to wither and shrink up at the mere sight of
+it."
+
+"It's all true, Jimmieboy," said the sprite. "I knew it all along. Why,
+he only gave us those cherries and peaches there in exchange for
+yourself because he expected to get them all back again, you know."
+
+"It was a glorious victory," said the colonel. "I will now announce it
+to the soldiers."
+
+This he did and the soldiers were wild with joy when they heard the
+news, and the band played a hymn of victory in which the soldiers
+joined, singing so vigorously that they nearly cracked their voices.
+When they had quite finished the colonel said he guessed it was time to
+return to the barracks in the nursery.
+
+"Not before the feast," said the sprite. "We have here all the
+provisions the general set out to get, and before you return home,
+colonel, you and your men should divide them among you."
+
+So the table was spread and all went happily. In the midst of the feast
+the major appeared, determination written upon every line of his face.
+The soldiers cheered him loudly as he walked down the length of the
+table, which he acknowledged as gracefully as he could with a stiff bow,
+and then he spoke:
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "I have always been a good deal of a favorite with
+you, and I know that what I am about to do will fill you with deep
+grief. I am going to stop being a man of war. The tremendous victory we
+have won to-day is the result entirely of the efforts of myself, General
+Jimmieboy and Major Sprite--for to the latter I now give the title I
+have borne so honorably for so many years. Our present victory is one of
+such brilliantly brilliant brilliance that I feel that I may now retire
+with lustre enough attached to my name to last for millions and millions
+of years. I need rest, and here I shall take it, in this beautiful
+valley, which by virtue of our victory belongs wholly and in equal parts
+to General Jimmieboy, Major Sprite and myself. Hereafter I shall be
+known only as Mortimer Carraway Blueface, Poet Laureate of Fortyforefoot
+Hall, Fortyforefoot Valley, Pictureland. As Governor-General of the
+country we have decided to appoint our illustrious friend, Major
+Benjamin Bludgeonhead Sprite. General Jimmieboy will remain commander of
+the forces, and the rest of you may divide amongst yourselves, as a
+reward for your gallant services, all the provisions that may now be
+left upon this table. It is all yours. I demand but one condition. That
+is that you do not take the table. It is of solid mahogany and must be
+worth a very considerable sum.
+
+    Now let the saddest word be said,
+    Now bend in sorrow deep the head.
+    Let tears flow forth and drench the dell:
+    Farewell, brave soldier boys, farewell."
+
+Here the major wiped his eyes sadly and sat down by the sprite who shook
+his hand kindly and thanked him for giving him his title of major.
+
+"We'll have fine times living here together," said the sprite.
+
+"Well, rather!" ejaculated the major. "I'm going to see if I can't have
+myself made over again, too, Spritey. I'll be pleasanter for you to look
+at. What's the use of being a tin soldier in a place where even the
+cobblestones are of gold and silver."
+
+"You can be plated any how," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Yes, and maybe I can have a platinum sword put in, and a real solid
+gold head--but just at present that isn't what I want," said the major.
+"What I am after now is a piece of birthday cake with real fruit raisins
+in it and strips of citron two inches long, the whole concealed beneath
+a one inch frosting. Is there any?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+HOME AGAIN.
+
+
+"I don't think we have any here," said Jimmieboy, who was much pleased
+to see the sprite and the major, both of whom he dearly loved, on such
+good terms. "But I'll run home and see if I can get some."
+
+"Well, we'll all go with you," said the colonel, starting up and
+ordering the trumpeters to sound the call to arms.
+
+"All except Blueface and myself," said the sprite. "We will stay here
+and put everything in readiness for your return."
+
+"That is a good idea," said Jimmieboy. "And you'll have to hurry for we
+shall be back very soon."
+
+This, as it turned out, was a very rash promise for Jimmieboy to make,
+for after he and the tin soldiers had got the birthday cake and were
+ready to enter Pictureland once more, they found that not one of them
+could do it, the frame was so high up and the picture itself so hard
+and impenetrable. Jimmieboy felt so badly to be unable to return to his
+friends, that, following the major's hint about sleep bringing
+forgetfulness of trouble, he threw himself down on the nursery couch,
+and closing his brimming eyes dozed off into a dreamless sleep.
+
+It was quite dark when he opened them again and found himself still on
+the couch with a piece of his papa's birthday cake in his hand, his
+sorrows all gone and contentment in their place. His papa was sitting at
+his side, and his mamma was standing over by the window smiling.
+
+"You've had a good long nap, Jimmieboy," said she, "and I rather think,
+from several things I've heard you say in your sleep, you've been
+dreaming about your tin soldiers."
+
+"I don't believe it was a dream, mamma," he said, "it was all too real."
+And then he told his papa all that had happened.
+
+"Well, it is very singular," said his papa, when Jimmieboy had finished,
+"and if you want to believe it all happened you may; but you say all the
+soldiers came back with you except Major Blueface?"
+
+"Yes, every one," said Jimmieboy.
+
+"Then we can tell whether it was true or not by looking in the tin
+soldier's box. If the major isn't there he may be up in Fortyforefoot
+castle as you say."
+
+Jimmieboy climbed eagerly down from the couch and rushing to the toy
+closet got out the box of soldiers and searched it from top to bottom.
+The major was not to be seen anywhere, nor to this day has Jimmieboy
+ever again set eyes upon him.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+The use of capitalisation for major and general has been retained as
+appears in the original publication. Punctuation has been standardised.
+Changes have been made as follows:
+
+    Page 60
+    ejaculated the Paralleopipedon _changed to_
+    ejaculated the Parallelopipedon?
+
+    Page 74
+    should have been resusticated _changed to_
+    should have been resusitated
+
+    Page 85
+     he would pay him fifty cent _changed to_
+     he would pay him fifty cents
+
+    Page 131
+    For intance, a cousin of mine _changed to_
+    For instance, a cousin of mine
+
+    Page 159
+    to do but accept your propostion _changed to_
+    to do but accept your proposition
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's In Camp With A Tin Soldier, by John Kendrick Bangs
+
+*** 
\ No newline at end of file