"Confound his dullness!" muttered the laureate. "I"m rapidly wearing out, poetizing about this boy." Then he added, aloud: "Certainly, your majesty. Here it is:
"He is the very dullest lad I"ve seen in all my life; For dullness he is quite as bad As any oyster-knife."
"Is that all?" asked the king, with a frown.
"I"m afraid four lines is as many as I can squeeze into a quatrain,"
said the laureate, returning the frown with interest.
"Then tell this young man"s ear, sirrah, how it comes that we get pleasure out of a garden in which nothing grows."
"If I must--I suppose I must," growled the laureate; and then he recited:
"The plan is thus, O little wit, You"ll see it in a minute; We get our pleasures out of it, Because there"s none within it."
"That is very poor poetry, Laury!" snapped the king.
"If you don"t like it, don"t take it," retorted the laureate. "I"m tired of this business, anyhow."
"And what, pray," cried the king, striding angrily forward to the mutinous poet, "what are you going to do about it?"
"I"m going to get up a revolution," retorted the laureate, shaking his quill pen fiercely at the king. "If I go to the people to-morrow, and promise not to write any more poetry, they"ll all be so grateful they"ll make me king, and set you to work wheeling coal in the mines for the mortals."
The king"s face grew so dark with anger as the laureate spoke that Jimmieboy"s eye could hardly see two inches before itself, and in haste the little fellow withdrew it from the scene. What happened next he never knew, but that missiles were thrown by the quarreling king and poet he was certain, for there was a tremendous shout, and something just tipped the end of his ear and went whizzing by, and rubbing his eyes, the boy looked about him, and discovered that he was still lying face downward upon the flat rock, but it was no longer transparent.
Off in the bushes directly back of him was his father, looking for a tennis ball. This, some people say, is the object that whizzed past Jimmieboy"s ear, but to this day the little fellow believes that it was nothing less than the king"s crown, which that worthy monarch had hurled at the laureate, that did this.
For my part I take sides with neither, for, as a matter of fact, I know nothing about it.
V.
JIMMIEBOY IN THE LIBRARY.
"I"m going to sit in this comfor"ble arm-chair by the fire," said Jimmieboy, climbing up into the capacious easy-chair in his father"s library, and settling down upon its soft cushioned seat. "I"ve had my supper, and it was all of cold things, and I think I ought to get "em warmed up before I go to bed."
"Very well," said his papa. "Only be careful, and keep your feet awake.
It wouldn"t be comfortable if your feet should go to sleep just about the time your mamma wanted you to go to bed. I"d have to carry you up stairs, if that should happen, and the doctor says if I carry you much longer I"ll have a back like a dromedary."
"Oh, that would be lovely!" said Jimmieboy. "I"d just like to see you with two humps on your back--one for me, and one for my little brother."
"Dear me!" said a gruff voice at Jimmieboy"s side--"Dear me! The idea of a boy of your age, with two sets of alphabet picture blocks and a dictionary right in the house, not knowing that a dromedary has only one hump! Ridiculous! Next thing you"ll be trying to say that the one-eyed catteraugus has two eyes."
Jimmieboy leaned over the arm of the chair to see who it could be that spoke. It wasn"t his father, that much was certain, because his father had often said that it wasn"t possible to do more than three things at once, and he was now doing that many--smoking a cigar, reading a book, and playing with the locket on the end of his watch-chain.
"Who are you, anyhow?" said Jimmieboy, as he peered over the arm, and saw nothing but the Dictionary.
"I"m myself--that"s who," was the answer, and then Jimmieboy was interested to see that it was nothing less than the Dictionary itself that had addressed him. "You ought to be more careful about the way you talk," added the Dictionary. "Your diction is airy without being dictionary, if you know what that means, which you don"t, as the Rose remarked to the Cauliflower, when the Cauliflower said he"d be a finer Rose than the Rose if he smelled as sweet."
"I"m very sorry," Jimmieboy replied, meekly, "I forgot that the dromedary only had one hump."
"I don"t believe you"d know a dromedary from a milk dairy if they both stood before you," retorted the Dictionary. "Now would you?"
"Yes, I think I would," said Jimmieboy. "The milk dairy would have cream in bottles in its windows, and the dromedary wouldn"t."
"Ah, but you don"t know why!" sang the Dictionary. "You don"t even begin to know why the dromedary wouldn"t have cream in bottles in its windows."
"No," said Jimmieboy, "I don"t. Why wouldn"t he?"
"Because he has no windows," laughed the Dictionary; "and between you and me, that"s one of the respects in which the dromedary is like a base-drum--there isn"t a solitary window in either of "em."
"You know a terrible lot, don"t you?" said Jimmieboy, patronizingly.
"Terrible isn"t the word. I"m simply hideously learned," said the Dictionary. "Why, I"ve been called a vocabulary, I know so many words."
"I wish you"d tell me all you know," said Jimmieboy, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair, and putting his chin on the palms of his two hands. "I"d like to know more than papa does--just for once. Do you know enough to tell me anything he doesn"t know?"
"Do I?" laughed the Dictionary. "Well, don"t I? Rather. Why, I"m telling him things all the time. He came and asked me the other night what raucous meant, and how to spell macrobiotic."
"And did you really know?" asked Jimmieboy, full of admiration for this wonderful creature.
"Yes; and a good deal more besides. Why, if he had asked me, I could have told him what a zygomatic zoophagan is; but he never asked me.
Queer, wasn"t it?"
"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "What is one of those things?"
"A zygomatic zoophagan? Why that"s a--er--let me see," said the Dictionary, turning over his leaves. "I like to search myself pretty thoroughly before I commit myself to a definition. A zygomatic zoophagan is a sort of cheeky animal that eats other animals. You are one, though I wouldn"t brag about it if I were you. You are an animal, and at times a very cheeky animal, and I"ve seen you eat beef. That"s what makes you a zygomatic zoophagan."
"Do I bite?" asked Jimmieboy, a little afraid of himself since he had learned what a fearful creature he was.
"Only at dinner-time, and unless you are very careless about it and eat too hastily you need not be afraid. Very few zygomatic zoophagans ever bite themselves. In fact, it never happened really but once that I know of. That was the time the zoophagan got the best of the eight-winged tallaha.s.see. Ever hear about that?"
"No, I never did," said Jimmieboy. "How did it happen?"
"This way," said the Dictionary, as he stood up and made a bow to Jimmieboy. And then he recited these lines:
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CALIPEE AND THE ZOOPHAGAN.]
"THE CALIPEE AND THE ZOOPHAGAN."
"The yellow-faced Zoophagan Was strolling near the sea, When from the depths of ocean Sprang forth that dread amp-hib-ian, The mawkish Calipee.
"The Tallaha.s.see bird sometimes The Calipee is called.
His eyes are round and big as dimes, He has eight wings, composes rhymes, His head is very bald.
"Now if there are two creatures in This world who disagree-- Two creatures full of woe and sin-- They are the Zo-oph, pale and thin, And that bad Calipee.