"Heigho," sighed the voice up in the tree. "Several days to wait, eh? I'm sure I don't know what I shall do to pass the time away." "Oh, as for that," observed the holly-hock; "I know an easy scheme for passing time. I learned it from a fairy I met once. "'Sit still and never raise your hands,' Advised the little elf, 'Pay no attention to the clock, And time will pass itself.' "You have nothing to do with it doing it that way," the holly-hock added. "That's a good idea," said the voice up in the tree. "It's queer I never thought of it, and I've been thinking and thinking ever so many years, trying to get up a scheme to pass the time." "You're not very deep, I'm afraid," said the rose bush. "You can't think very valuable thoughts, can you?" "I'm sure I don't know," the voice up the tree replied. "I've never tried to sell them, so of course I can't tell whether they are valuable or not. Do you sell what you think?" "Certainly I do," returned the rose bush. "I suggested the idea of making honey to the bees. Wasn't that a great thing to do?" "Yes, indeed," returned the voice. "It was splendid. I've never had any honey, but I'm told it's fine. It's very sticky, isn't it?" "Very," said the rose bush. "I guess honey is about as sticky as anything can be." "And very useful for that reason," said the voice up in the tree, kindly. "Very useful. I suppose, really, if it wasn't for honey, people couldn't make postage stamps stay on letters. You ought to be very happy to think that one of your thoughts has given people the idea of mucilage. Do they ever use honey for anything else but its stickiness?" "Hoh!" jeered the rose bush. "Don't you know anything?" "Not much," said the tree voice. "I know you, and me, and several other things, but that's not much, is it? It's really queer how little I know. Why, would you believe it, a sparrow asked me the other day what was the difference between a robin's egg and a red blackberry, and I didn't know." "What did you tell him?" asked the holly-hock. "I told him I couldn't tell until I had eaten them." "And what did he say?" put in the tiger lily, with a grin. "He said that wasn't the answer; that one was blue and the other was green, but how a red blackberry can be green I can't see," replied the voice up in the tree. Jimmieboy smiled quietly at this, and the voice up the tree continued: "Then he asked me what color blueberries were, and I told him they were blue; then he said he'd bet a mosquito I couldn't tell him what color huckleberries were, and when I said they were of a delicate huckle he laughed, and said I owed him a mosquito. I may owe him a mosquito, but I haven't an idea what he was laughing at." "That's easy," said the holly-hock. "He was laughing because there isn't any such color as huckle."