"Whene"er they meet they"re sure to fight, No matter where they are; Nor do they stop by day or night, Till one is beaten out of sight, Or safety seeks afar.
"And, sad to say, the Calipee Is stronger of the two; And so he"d won the victory At all times from his enemy, The slight and slender Zoo.
"But this time it went otherwise, For, so the story goes, As yonder sun set in the skies, The Calipee, to his surprise, Was whacked square on the nose.
"Which is the fatal, mortal part Of all the Calipees; Much more important than the heart, For life is certain to depart When Cali cannot sneeze.
"The world, surprised, asked "How was it?
How did he do it so?
Where did the Zoo get so much wit?
How did he learn so well to hit So fatally his foe?"
""Twas but his strategy," then cried The friends of little Zoo; "As Cali plunged, our hero shied, Ran twenty feet off to one side, And bit himself in two.
""And then, you see, the Calipee Was certainly undone; The Zo-oph beat him easily, As it must nearly always be When there are two to one."
"Rather a wonderful tale that," continued the Dictionary. "I don"t know that I really believe it, though. It"s too great a tale for any dog to wag, eh?"
"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "I don"t think I believe it either. If the zoophagan bit himself in two, I should think he"d have died. I know I would."
"No, you wouldn"t," said the Dictionary; "because you couldn"t. It isn"t a question of would and could, but of wouldn"t and couldn"t. By-the-way, here"s a chance for you to learn something. What"s the longest letter in the alphabet?"
"They"re all about the same, aren"t they?" asked Jimmieboy.
"They look so, but they aren"t. L is the longest. An English ell is forty-five inches long. Here"s another. What letter does a Chinaman wear on his head?"
"Double eye!" cried Jimmieboy.
"That"s pretty good," said the Dictionary, with an approving nod; "but you"re wrong. He wears a Q. And I"ll tell you why a Q is like a Chinaman. Chinamen don"t amount to a row of beans, and a Q is nothing but a zero with a pig-tail. Do you know why they put A at the head of the alphabet?"
"No."
"Because Alphabet begins with an A."
"Then why don"t they put T at the end of it?" asked Jimmieboy.
"They do," said the Dictionary. "I-T--it."
Jimmieboy laughed to himself. He had no idea there was so much fun in the Dictionary. "Tell me something more," he said.
"Let me see. Oh, yes," said the Dictionary, complacently. "How"s this?
""Oh, what is a yak, sir?" the young man said; "I really much wish to hear."
"A queer-looking cad with a bushy head, A buffalo-robe all over him spread, And whiskers upon his ear."
"And tell me, I pray," said the boy in drab, Just what"s a Thelphusi-an?"
"A great big crab with nippers that nab Whatever the owner desires to grab-- A crusty crustace-an."
""I"m obliged," said the boy, with a wide, wide smirk, As he slowly moved away.
"Will you tell me, sir, ere I go to work-- To toil till the night brings along its murk-- How high peanuts are to-day?"
"And I had to give in, For I couldn"t say; And the boy, with a grin, Moved off on his way."
"That was my own personal experience," said the Dictionary. "The boy was a very mean boy, too. He went about telling people that there were a great many things I didn"t know, which was very true, only he never said what they were, and his friends thought they were important things, like the meaning of sagaciousness, and how many jays are there in geranium, and others. If he"d told "em that it was things like the price of peanuts, and how are the fish biting to-day, and is your mother"s seal-skin sack plush or velvet, that I didn"t know, they"d not have thought it disgraceful. Oh, it was awfully mean!"
"Particularly after you had told him what those other things were," said Jimmieboy.
"Yes; but I got even with him. He came to me one day to find out what an episode was, and I told him it was a poem in hysterical hexameters, with a refrain repeated every eighteenth line, to be sung to slow music."
"And what happened?" asked Jimmieboy.
"He told his teacher that, and he was kept in for two months, and made to subtract two apples from one lunch every recess."
"Oh, my, how awful!" cried Jimmieboy.
"But it served him right. Don"t you think so?" said the Dictionary.
"Yes, I do," said Jimmieboy. "But tell me. What"ll I tell papa that he doesn"t know?"
"Tell him that a sa.s.spipedon is a barrel with four sides, and is open at both ends, and is a much better place for cigar ashes than his lap, because they pa.s.s through it to the floor, and so do not soil his clothes."
"Good!" said Jimmieboy, peering across the room to where his father still sat smoking. "I think I"ll tell him now. Say, papa," he cried sitting up, "what is a sa.s.spipedon?"
"I don"t know. What?" answered Jimmieboy"s father, laying his paper down, and coming over to where the little boy sat.
"It"s a--it"s a--it"s an ash-barrel," said the little fellow, trying to remember what the Dictionary had said.
"Who said so?" asked papa.
"The Dictionary," answered Jimmieboy.
And when Jimmieboy"s father came to examine the Dictionary on the subject, the disagreeable old book hadn"t a thing to say about the sa.s.spipedon, and Jimmieboy went up to bed wondering what on earth it all meant, anyhow.
VI.
JIMMIEBOY"S SNOWMAN.
The snow had been falling fast for well-nigh forty-eight hours and Jimmieboy was almost crazy with delight. He loved the snow because it was possible to do so much with it. One didn"t need to go into a store, for instance, and part with ten cents every time one happened to want a ball, when there was snow on the ground. Then, too, Jimmieboy had a new sled he wanted to try, but best of all, his father had promised to make him a snowman, with shoe-b.u.t.tons for eyes and a battered old hat on his head, if perchance there could be found anywhere in the house a hat of that sort. Fortunately a battered old hat was found, and the snowman when finished looked very well in it. I say fortunately because Jimmieboy had fully made up his mind that a battered hat was absolutely necessary to make the snowman a success, and had not the old one been found I very much fear the youth would have taken his father"s new one and battered that into the state of usefulness required to complete the icy statue to his satisfaction.
After the snowman was finished Jimmieboy romped about him and shouted in great glee for an hour or more, and then, growing a little weary of the sport, he ran up into his nursery to rest for a little while. He had not been there very long however when he became, for some unknown reason, uneasy about the funny looking creature he had left behind him. Running to the window he looked out to see if the snowman was all right, and he was much surprised to discover that he wasn"t there at all. He couldn"t have melted, that was certain, for the air was colder than it had been when the snowman was put up. No one could have stolen him because he was too big, and so, well, it certainly was a strange conclusion, but none the less the only one, he must have walked off himself.
"It"s mighty queer!" thought Jimmieboy. "He was there ten minutes ago."
Then he ran down stairs and peered out of the window. At the front of the house no snowman was in sight. Then he went to a side window and looked out. Still no snowman. And then the door-bell rang, and Jimmieboy went to the door and opened it, and, dear me! how he laughed when he saw who it was that had rung the bell, as would also have you, for, honestly, it was no one else than the snowman himself.