JIMMIEBOY MEETS THE ENEMY.
AS the noise made by the clattering hoofs of Major Blueface's horse grew fainter and fainter, and finally died away entirely in the distance, Jimmieboy was a little startled to hear something that sounded very like a hiss in the trees behind him. At first he thought it was the light breeze blowing through the branches, making the leaves rustle, but when it was repeated he stopped short in the road and glanced backward, grasping his sword as he did so.
"Hello there!" he cried. "Who are you, and what do you want?"
"Sh-sh-sh!" answered the mysterious something. "Don't talk so loud, general, the major may come back."
"What if he does?" said Jimmieboy. "I rather think I wish he would. I don't know whether or not I'm big enough not to be afraid of you. Can't you come out of the bushes and let me see you?"
"Not unless the major is out of sight," was the answer. "I can't stand the major; but you needn't be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt you for all the world. I'm the enemy."
"The what?" cried Jimmieboy, aghast.
"I'm the enemy," replied the invisible object. "That's what I call myself when I'm with sensible people. Other people have a long name for me that I never could pronounce or spell. I'm the animal that got away."
"Not the Parallelopipedon?" said Jimmieboy.
"That's it! That's the name I can't pronounce," said the invisible animal. "I'm the Parallelandsoforth, and I've been trying to have an interview with you ever since I heard they'd made you general. The fact is, Jimmieboy, I am very anxious that you should succeed in capturing me, because I don't like it out here very much. The fences are the toughest eating I ever had, and I actually sprained my wisdom-tooth at breakfast this morning trying to bite a brown stone ball off the top of a gate post."
"But if you feel that way," said Jimmieboy, somewhat surprised at this unusual occurrence, "why don't you surrender?"
"Me?" cried the Parallelopipedon. "A Parallelandsoforth of my standing surrender right on the eve of a battle that means all the sweetmeats I can eat, and more too? I guess not."
"I wish I could see you," said Jimmieboy, earnestly. "I don't like standing here talking to a wee little voice with nothing to him. Why don't you come out here where I can see you?"
"It's for your good, Jimmieboy; that's why I stay in here. I am an awful spectacle. Why, it puts me all in a tremble just to look at myself; and if it affects me that way, just think how it would be with you."
"I wouldn't be afraid," said Jimmieboy, bravely.
"Yes, you would too," answered the Parallelopipedon. "You'd be so scared you couldn't run, I am so ugly. Didn't the major tell you that story about my reflection in the looking-glass?"
"No," answered Jimmieboy. "He didn't say anything about it."
"That's queer. The story is in rhyme, and the major always tells everybody all the poetry he knows," said the invisible enemy. "That's why I never go near him. He has only enough to last one year, and the second year he tells it all over again. I'm surprised he never told you about my reflection in the mirror, because it is one of his worst, and he always likes them better than the others."
"I'll ask him to tell it to me next time I see him," said Jimmieboy, "unless you'll tell it to me now."
"I'd just as lief tell you," said the Parallelopipedon. "Only you mustn't laugh or cry, because you haven't time to laugh, and generals never cry. This is the way it goes:
"THE PARALLELOPIPEDON AND THE MIRROR.
The Parallelopipedon so very ugly is,His own heart fills with terror when he looks upon his phiz.
That's why he wears blue goggles—twenty pairs upon his nose,
And never dares to show himself, no matter where he goes.
One day when he was walking down a crowded village street,
He looked into a little shop where stood a mirror neat.
He saw his own reflection there as plain as plain could be;
And said, 'I'd give four dollars if that really wasn't me.'
And, strange to say, the figure in the mirror's silver face
Was also filled with terror at the other's lack of grace;
And this reflection trembled till it strangely came to pass
The handsome mirror shivered to ten thousand bits of glass.
To this tale there's a moral, and that moral briefly is:
If you perchance are burdened with a terrifying phiz,
Don't look into your mirror—'tis a fearful risk to take—
'Tis certain sure to happen that the mirror it will break."
"Well, if that's so, I guess I don't want to see you," said Jimmieboy. "I only like pretty things. But tell me; if all this is true, how did the major come to say it? I thought he couldn't tell the truth."
"That's only as a rule. Rules have exceptions. For instance," explained the Parallelopipedon, "as a rule I can't pronounce my name, but in reciting that poem to you I did speak my name in the very first line—but if you only knew how it hurt me to do it! Oh dear me, how it hurt! Did you ever have a tooth pulled?"
"Once," said Jimmieboy, wincing at the remembrance of his painful experience.
"Well, pronouncing my name is to me worse than having all my teeth pulled and then put back again, and except when I get hold of a fine general like you I never make the sacrifice," said the Parallelopipedon. "But tell me, Jimmieboy, you are out after preserved cherries and pickled peaches, I understand?"
"Yes," said Jimmieboy. "And powdered sugar, almonds, jam, and several other things that are large and elegant."
"Well, just let me tell you one thing," said the Parallelopipedon, confidentially. "I'm so sick of cherries and peaches that I run every time I see them, and when I run there is no tin soldier or general of your size in the world that can catch me. Now what are we here for? I am here to be captured; you are here to capture me. To accomplish our various purposes we've got to begin right, and you might as well understand now as at any other time that you are beginning wrong."
"I don't know what else to do," said Jimmieboy. "I'm obeying orders. The colonel told me to get those things, and I supposed I ought to get 'em."
"It doesn't pay to suppose," said the Parallelopipedon. "Many a victory has been lost by a supposition. As that old idiot Major Blueface said once, when he tried to tell an untruth, and so hit the truth by mistake:
'Success always comes to
The mortal who knows,
And never to him who
Does naught but suppose.
For knowledge is certain,
While hypothesees
Oft drop defeat's curtain
On great victories.'"
"What are hypothesees?" asked Jimmieboy.
"They are ifs in words of four syllables," said the Parallelopipedon, "and you want to steer clear of them as much as you can."
"I'll try to," said Jimmieboy. "But how am I to get knowledge instead of hypotheseeses? I have to take what people tell me. I don't know everything."
"Well, that's only natural," said the Parallelopipedon, kindly. "There are only two creatures about here that do know everything. They—between you and me—are me and myself. The others you meet here don't even begin to know everything, though they'll try to make you believe they do. Now I dare say that tin colonel of yours would try to make you believe that water is wet, and that fire is hot, and other things like that. Well, they are, but he doesn't know it. He only thinks it. He has put his hand into a pail of water and found out that it was wet, but he doesn't know why it is wet any more than he knows why fire is hot."
"Do you?" queried Jimmieboy.
"Certainly," returned the Parallelopipedon. "Water is wet because it is water, and fire is hot because it wouldn't be fire if it wasn't hot. Oh, it takes brains to know everything, Jimmieboy, and if there's one thing old Colonel Zinc hasn't got, it's brains. If you don't believe it, cut his head off some day and see for yourself. You won't find a whole brain in his head."
"It must be nice to know everything," said Jimmieboy.
"It's pretty nice," said the Parallelopipedon, cautiously. "But it's not always the nicest thing in the world. If you are off on a long journey, for instance, it's awfully hard work to carry all you know along with you. It has given me a headache many a time, I can tell you. Sometimes I wish I did like your papa, and kept all I know in books instead of in my head. It's a great deal better to do things that way; then, when you go travelling, and have to take what you know along with you, you can just pack it up in a trunk and make the railroad people carry it."
"Do you know what's going to happen to-morrow and the next day?" asked Jimmieboy, gazing in rapt admiration at the spot whence the voice proceeded.
"Yes, indeed. That's just where the great trouble comes in," answered the Parallelopipedon. "It isn't so much bother to know what has been—what everybody knows—but when you have to store up in your mind thousands and millions of things that aren't so now, but have got to be so some day, it's positively awful. Why, Jimmieboy," he said, impressively, "you'd be terrified if I told you what is going to be known by the time you go to school; it's awful to think of all the things you will have to learn then that aren't things yet, but are going to be within a year or two. I'm real sorry for the little boys who will live a hundred years from now, when I think of all the history they will have to learn when they go to school—history that isn't made yet. Just take the Presidents of the United States, for instance. In George Washington's time it didn't take a boy five seconds to learn the list of Presidents; but think of that list to-day! Why, there are twenty-five names on it now, and more to come. It gets harder every year. Now I—I know the names of all the Presidents there's ever going to be, and it would take me just eighteen million nine hundred and sixty-seven years, eleven months and twenty-six days, four hours and twenty-eight minutes to tell you all of them, and even then I wouldn't be half through."
"Why, it's terrible," said Jimmieboy.
"Yes, indeed it is," returned the Parallelopipedon. "You ought to be glad you are a little boy now instead of having to wait until then. The boys of the year 19,605,726,422 are going to have the hardest time in the world learning things, and I don't believe they'll get through going to school much before they're ninety years old."
"I guess the colonel is glad he doesn't know all that," said Jimmieboy, "if it's so hard to carry it around with you."
"Indeed he ought to be, if he isn't," ejaculated the Parallelopipedon. "There's no two ways about it; if he had the weight of one half of what I know on his shoulders, it would bend him in two and squash him into a piece of tin-foil."
"Say," said Jimmieboy, after a moment's pause. "I heard my papa say he thought I might be President of the United States some day. If you know all the names of the Presidents that are to come, tell me, will I be?"
"I don't remember any name like Jimmieboy on the list," said the Parallelopipedon; "but that doesn't prove anything. You might get elected on your last name. But don't let's talk about that—that's politics, and I don't like politics. What I want to know is, do you really want to capture me?"
"Yes, I do," said Jimmieboy.
"Then you'd better give up trying to get the peaches and cherries," said the Parallelopipedon, firmly. "I won't have 'em. You can shoot 'em at me at the rate of a can a minute for ninety-seven years, and I'll never surrender. I hate 'em."
"But what am I to do, then?" queried the little general. "What must I do to capture you?"
"Get something in the place of the cherries and peaches that I like, that's all. Very simple matter, that."
"But I don't know what you like," said Jimmieboy. "I never took lunch with you."
"No—and you never will," answered the Parallelopipedon. "And for a very good reason. I never eat lunch, breakfast, tea, or supper. I never eat anything but dinner, and I eat that four times a day."
Jimmieboy laughed, half with mirth at the oddity of the Parallelopipedon's habit of eating, and half with the pleasure it gave him to think of what a delectable habit it was. Four dinners a day seemed to him to be the height of bliss, and he almost wished he too were a Parallelopipedon, that he might enjoy the same privilege.
"Don't you ever eat between meals?" he asked, after a minute of silence.
"Never," said the Parallelopipedon. "Never. There isn't time for it in the first place, and in the second there's never anything left between meals for me to eat. But if you had ever dined with me you'd know mighty well what I like, for I always have the same thing at every single dinner—two platefuls of each thing. It's a fine plan, that of having the same dishes at every dinner, day after day. Your stomach always knows what to expect, and is ready for it, so you don't get cholera morbus. If you want me to, I'll tell you what I always have, and what you must get me before you can coax me back."
"Thank you," said Jimmieboy. "I'll be very much obliged."
And then the Parallelopipedon recited the following delicious bill of fare for the young general.
"THE PARALLELOPIPEDON'S DINNER.
First bring on a spring mock-turtleStuffed with chestnuts roasted through,
Served in gravy; then a fertile
Steaming bowl of oyster stew.
Then about six dozen tartlets
Full of huckleberry jam,
Edges trimmed with juicy Bartletts—
Pears, these latter—then some ham.
Follow these with cauliflower,
Soaked in maple syrup sweet;
Then an apple large and sour,
And a rich red rosy beet.
Then eight quarts of cream—vanilla
Is the flavor I like best—
Acts sublimely as a chiller,
Gives your fevered system rest.
After this a pint of coffee,
Forty jars of marmalade,
And a pound of peanut toffee,
Then a pumpkin pie—home-made.
Top this off with pickled salmon,
Cold roast beef, and eat it four
Times each day, and ghastly famine
Ne'er will enter at your door."
"H'm! h'm! h'm!" cried Jimmieboy, dancing up and down, and clapping his hands with delight at the very thought of such a meal. "Do you mean to say that you eat that four times a day?"
"Yes," said the Parallelopipedon, "I do. In fact, general, it is that that has made me what I am. I was originally a Parallelogram, and I ate that four times a day, and it kept doubling me up until I became six Parallelograms as I am to-day. Get me those things—enough of them to enable me to have 'em five times a day, and I surrender. Without them, I go on and stay escaped forever, and the longer I stay escaped, the worse it will be for these people who live about here, for I shall devastate the country. I shall chew up all the mowing-machines in Pictureland. I'll bite the smoke-stack off every railway engine I encounter, and throw it into the smoking car, where it really belongs. I'll drink all the water in the wells. I'll pull up all the cellars by the roots; I may even go so far as to run down into your nursery, and gnaw into the wire that holds this picture country upon the wall, and let it drop into the water pitcher. But, oh dear, there's the major coming down the road!" he added, in a tone of alarm. "I must go, or he'll insist on telling me a poem. But remember what I say, my boy, and beware! I'll do all I threaten to do if you don't do what I tell you. Good-by!"
There was a slight rustling among the leaves, and the Parallelopipedon's voice died away as Major Blueface came galloping up astride of his panting, lather-covered steed.