up to me a very
sweet little girl.

"Do you write stories in _The Little Corporal_?" she asked.

When I told her I did, she looked up, and asked, earnestly, "Well, is
there any real, live Chicken Little?"

Now there may be others of the great army of _The Little Corporal_ that
want to know whether there is any "real, live Chicken Little." I tell you
there is. If you could see her merry mischievous face; if you could see
her when she stands up on my shoulders like a monkey; if you had heard
her, yesterday, explain that God could see in the stove when all the
doors were shut; if you could see how she always manages to do what you
don't want her to do, and then find a good excuse for it afterward; you
would think there was a live, real "Chicken Little." If you could have
seen the old, funny twinkle in her eye, when I found her with the
stereoscope, you would have thought she was a real, live Chicken, sure
enough.

"Now, then, you've got to tell me a story," she said.

"'_Got to_' don't tell stories."

"Well, p'ease tell me one, then."

"Yes," said Sunbeam, peeping in, "about the Great Panjandrum himself."

"Ah! you little mink," I said, "how did you get hold of my secret?"

"Why, I knew it all the time."

Now, you see, the case was this; I did not know that the children
understood where the names of the Garuly and the Joblily, and the
Pickaninny came from. But Sunbeam, who dips a little here and there into
a great many books, and who never forgets anything she hears, had somehow
gotten hold of my secret. It was this. There was a man who could repeat
whatever he read once. One of his friends undertook to write something
that he could not remember. So he wrote nonsense, and the man with the
long memory failed to remember it. The nonsense, which I read when I was
a boy, is, if I remember it rightly, as follows:

"She went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and
a great she-bear coming down the street thrust his head into the shop.
'What, no soap?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber.
And there were present the Garulies, and the Joblilies, and the
Pickaninnies, and the Great Panjandrum himself, with his little, round
button-at-the-top; and they all fell to playing the game of
'Catch-as-catch-can,' till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their
boots."

Now you see where the Garulies and the Joblilies and the Pickaninnies
came from. And that's why the children thought