d customers
with bundles, all stood around talking and wondering about two things
next to each other on the street car track in the middle of the
street. One was a tin brass goat. The other was a tin brass goose. And
they lay next to each other.

[Illustration]

The Dollar Watch and the Five Jack
Rabbits

Long ago, long before the waylacks lost the wonderful stripes of oat
straw gold and the spots of timothy hay green in their marvelous
curving tail feathers, long before the doo-doo-jangers whistled among
the honeysuckle blossoms and the bitter-basters cried their last and
dying wrangling cries, long before the sad happenings that came later,
it was then, some years earlier than the year Fifty Fifty, that Young
Leather and Red Slippers crossed the Rootabaga Country.

To begin with, they were walking across the Rootabaga Country. And
they were walking because it made their feet glad to feel the dirt of
the earth under their shoes and they were close to the smells of the
earth. They learned the ways of birds and bugs, why birds have wings,
why bugs have legs, why the gladdywhingers have spotted eggs in a
basket nest in a booblow tree, and why the chizzywhizzies scrape off
little fiddle songs all summer long while the summer nights last.

Early one morning they were walking across the corn belt of the
Rootabaga Country singing, "Deep Down Among the Dagger Dancers." They
had just had a breakfast of coffee and hot hankypank cakes covered
with cow's butter. Young Leather said to Red Slippers, "What is the
best secret we have come across this summer?"

"That is easy to answer," Red Slippers said with a long flish of her
long black eyelashes. "The best secret we have come across is a rope
of gold hanging from every star in the sky and when we want to go up
we go up."

Walking on they came to a town where they met a man with a sorry face.
"Why?" they asked him. And he answered, "My brother is in jail."

"What for?" they asked him again. And he answered again, "My brother
put on a straw hat in the middle of the winter and went out on the
streets laughing; my brother had his hair cut pompompadour and went
out on the streets bareheaded in the summertime laughing; and these
things were against the law. Worst of all he sneezed at the wrong time
and he sneezed before the wrong persons; he sneezed when it was not
wise to sneeze. So he will be hang