adies were on foot, and they began to scream, 'Oh, the cow! the cow!'
and to take hold of the knights, and to get on to the fence, till it was
perfectly packed with them; and who do you think the fairy godmother
found had scrambled up on top of her chariot?"

The nephew and niece were afraid to risk a guess, and the papa had to
say:

"The Khant! The fairy godmother pulled her inside and hugged her and
kissed her, she was so glad to find out that she was the one; and she
stopped the procession on the spot, and she called up the Imam, and he
married the Khant to Prince--"

The papa stopped, and as the niece and nephew hesitated, he said, very
sternly, "Well?"

The fact is, they had got so mixed up about the Khan and the Khant of
Tartary that they had forgotten which was Butterflyflutterby and which
was Flutterbybutterfly. They tried, shouting out one the one and the
other the other, but the papa said:

"Oh no! That won't work. I've had that sort of thing tried on me before,
and it _never_ works. _I_ heard you whispering what you would do, and
you have simply added the crime of double-dealing to the crime of
inattention. The story has stopped, and stopped forever."

The nephew stretched himself and then sat up in bed. "Well, it had got
to the end, anyway."

"Oh, _had_ it? What became of the wicked enchantress?" The nephew lay
down again, in considerable dismay.

"Uncle," said the niece, very coaxingly, "_I_ didn't say it had come to
the end."

"But it has," said the papa. "And I'm mighty glad you forgot the
Prince's name, for the rule of this story is that it has to go on as
long as any one listening remembers, and it might have gone on
forever."

"I suppose," the nephew said, "a person may guess?"

"He may, if he guesses right. If he guesses wrong, he has to be thrown
from a high tower--the same one the wicked enchantress was thrown from."

"There!" shouted the nephew; "you said you wouldn't tell. How high was
the tower, anyway, uncle? As high as the Eiffel Tower in Paris?"

"Not quite. It was three feet and five inches high."

"Ho! Then the enchantress was a dwarf!"

"Who said she was a dwarf?"

"There wouldn't be any use throwing her from the tower if she wasn't."

"I didn't say it was any use. They just did it for ornament."

This made the nephew so mad that he began to dig the papa with his fist,
and the papa began to laugh. He said, as well as he could for laughing:
"You see, the trouble was to