"Yes. Here"s a new bit of Mother Goose I"ve dashed off:
"_Namby Pamby sat on the fence, Namby Pamby tumbled from thence.
Half the queen"s donkeys, her dog, and her cat, Could not restore Namby to where he was at._"
"Why!" cried Mollie. "You can"t write that. It"s nothing but Humpty Dumpty all over again."
"You"re all wrong there," retorted the Unwiseman. "And I can prove it.
You say that I can"t write that. Well, I _have_ written it, which proves that I _can_. As for its being Humpty Dumpty all over again, that"s plain nonsense. Namby Pamby is not Humpty Dumpty. Namby Pamby begins with an N and a P, while Humpty Dumpty begins with H and D. Then, again, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. My hero sat on a fence. Humpty Dumpty fell. Namby Pamby tumbled--and so it goes all through the poem.
Mine is entirely different. Besides, it"s a hysterical episode, and I"ve got just as much right to make poems about hystery as Mother Goose had."
"Maybe you"re right," said Mollie. "But if I were you, I wouldn"t write things that are too much like what other people have written."
"I don"t see why," said the Unwiseman, impatiently. "If Peter Smith writes a poem that everybody likes and buys, I want to write something as much like what Peter Smith has made a fortune out of as Peter Smith has. That"s the point. But we won"t quarrel about it. Girls don"t know much about business, and men do. I"m a man and you"re only a girl."
"Well, I think Mollie"s right," put in Whistlebinkie.
"You have to," retorted the Unwiseman. "If you didn"t, she"d pack you up in a box and send you out to the sheathen."
"The what?" asked Mollie.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Sheathen."]
"The sheathen. Little girl savages. I call "em sheathen to extinguish them from heathen, who are, as I understand it, little boy savages,"
explained the Unwiseman. "But what do you think of this for a poem. It"s called Night, and you mustn"t laugh at it because it is serious:
"_Oh night, dear night, in street and park, Where"er thou beest thou"rt always dark.
Thou dustent change, O sweet brunette, No figgleness is thine, you bet.
And what I love the best, on land or sea, Is absence of the vice of figglety._"
"What"s figglety?" asked Mollie.
"Figglety?" echoed the Unwiseman. "Don"t you know that? Figglety is figgleness, or the art of being figgle."
"But I don"t know what being figgle is," said Mollie.
"Hoh!" sneered the Unwiseman, angry at Mollie"s failure to understand and to admire his serious poem. "Where have you been brought up? Figgle is changing. If you pretend to like pie to-day better than anything, and change around to pudding to-morrow, you are figgle. Some people spell it fickle, but somehow or other I like figgle better. It"s a word of my own, figgle is, while fickle is a word everybody uses--but I won"t argue with you any more," he added with an impatient gesture. "You"ve found fault with almost everything I"ve done, and I"m not going to read any more to you. It"s discouraging enough to have people pa.s.s you by and not buy your poems, without reading "em to a little girl that finds fault with "em, backed up in her opinion by a pug dog and a rubber doll like Whistlebinkie. Some time, when you are better natured, I"ll read more to you, but now I won"t."
Saying which, the Unwiseman turned away and walked into his house, banging the door behind him in a way which plainly showed that he was offended.
Mollie and Whistlebinkie and Gyp went silently home, very unhappy about the Unwiseman"s temper, but, though they did not know it, they were very fortunate to get away before the Unwiseman discovered that the mischievous Gyp had chewed up three pounds of sonnets while their author was reading his poem "Night," so that on the whole, I think, they were to be congratulated that things turned out as they did.
[Ill.u.s.tration: X. The Unwiseman"s Luncheon.
In which the Unwiseman makes some sensible remarks on eating.
"Whistlebinkie,"]
said Mollie, one morning in the early spring, "it"s been an awful long time since we saw the Unwiseman."
"Tha.s.so," whistled Whistlebinkie. "I wonder what"s become of him."
"I can"t even guess," said Mollie. "I asked papa the other morning if he had seen any of his poetry in print and he said he hadn"t so far as he knew, although he had read several books of poetry lately that sounded as if he"d written them. I say we go out and try to find him."
"Thasoots me," said Whistlebinkie.
"What"s that?" said Mollie. "You still talk through the top of your hat so much that I really can"t make out what you say half the time."
"I forgot," said Whistlebinkie, meekly. "What I meant to say was that that suits me. I"d like very much to see him again and hear some of his poetry."
"I don"t much think he"s stayed in that business," observed Mollie.
"He"s had time enough to be in sixteen different kinds of businesses since we saw him, and I"m pretty certain that he"s tried eight of them any how."
"I guess may be so," said Whistlebinkie. "He"s a great tryer, that old Unwiseman."
Mollie donned her new spring hat and Whistlebinkie treated his face and hands to a dash of cold water, after which they started out.
"It"s the same old question now," said Mollie, as she stood on the street corner, wondering which way to turn. "Where would we better go to find him?"
"Well, it seems to me," said Whistlebinkie, after a moment"s thought, "it seems to me that we"d better look for him in just the same place he was in the last time we saw him."
"I don"t see why," returned Mollie. "We never did that before."
"That"s why," explained Whistlebinkie. "He"s such an unaccountable old man that he"s sure to turn up where you least expected him. Now, as I look at it, the place where we least expect to find him is where he was before. Therefore I say let"s go there."
"You"re pretty wise after all, Whistlebinkie," said Mollie, with an approving nod. "We"ll go there."
And it turned out that Whistlebinkie was right.
The house of the Unwiseman was found standing in precisely the same place in which they had last seen it, but pasted upon the front door was a small placard which read, "Gawn to Lunch. Will be Back in Eight Weeks."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "He must be fearfully hungry to go to a lunch it will take that long to eat."]
"Dear me!" cried Whistlebinkie, as Mollie read the placard to him. "He must have been fearfully hungry to go to a lunch it will take that long to eat."
Mollie laughed. "I guess maybe I know him well enough to know what that means," she said. "It means that he"s inside the house and doesn"t want to be bothered by anybody. Let"s go round to the back door and see if that is open."
This was no sooner said than done, but the back door, like the first, was closed. Like the front door, too, it bore a placard, but this one read, "As I said before, I"ve gone to lunch. If you want to know when I"ll be back, don"t bother about ringing the bell to ask me, for I shall not answer. Go round to the front door and find out for yourself. Yours tooly, the Unwiseman. P. S. I"ve given up the potery business, so if you"re a editor, I don"t want to see you any how; but if your name"s Mollie, knock on the kitchen window and I"ll let you in."
"I thought so," said Mollie. "He"s inside."
Then the little girl tiptoed softly up to the kitchen window and peeped in, and there the old gentleman sat nibbling on a chocolate eclaire and looking as happy as could be.
Mollie tapped gently on the window, and the Unwiseman, hurriedly concealing his half-eaten eclaire in the folds of his newspaper, looked anxiously toward the window to see who it might be that had disturbed him. When he saw who it was his face wreathed with smiles, and rushing to the window he threw it wide open.
"Come right in," he cried. "I"m awfully glad to see you."