Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Children's stories, American; Fantasy literature; Short stories, American
"Meanwhile the Giant had come to a stand-still. He couldn't run in any
direction until his heads had agreed as to which way he should go, and
all this time the beautiful hats were getting farther and farther away,
and the heads more frantic than ever. For five full minutes they
quarreled thus among themselves, turning now and then to peer weepingly
after their beloved silk hats, and finally, with a supreme effort, each
endeavored to force the Giant in the direction it wished him to go, with
the result that poor Forepate was torn to pieces, and fell dead in the
middle of the street."
Here papa paused and closed his eyes for a minute.
"Is that all?" queried Jimmieboy.
"Yes--I believe that's all. The Dude Giant was dead and the Dwarf was
avenged."
"And what became of Tiny?" asked Jimmieboy.
"Oh, Tiny," said his father, "Tiny--he--he laughed so heartily at the
Dude Giant's mishap that he loosened the impediment to his growth,--"
"The what?" asked Jimmieboy, to whom words like impediment were rather
strange.
"Why, the bone that kept him from growing," explained the story teller.
"He loosened that and began to grow again, and inside of two weeks he
was as handsome a six-footer as you ever saw, and as he had made a
million and a half of dollars he resigned from the Exhibition and
settled down in Europe for a number of years, had himself made a Grand
Duke, and then came back to New York and got married, and lived happy
ever after."
And then, as the getting-up bell rang down stairs, Jimmieboy thanked his
father for the story and went into the nursery to dress for breakfast.
III.
JIMMIEBOY'S DREAM POETRY.
If there is anything in the world that Jimmieboy likes better than
custard and choo-choo cars, it is to snuggle down in his papa's lap
about bedtime and pretend to keep awake. It doesn't matter at all how
tired he is, or how late bedtime may on special occasions be delayed, he
is never ready to be undressed and "filed away for the night," as his
Uncle Periwinkle puts it.
It was just this way the other night. He was as sleepy as he possibly
could be. The sandman had left enough sand in his eyes, or so it seemed
to Jimmieboy, to start a respectable sea-beach, and he really felt as if
all he needed to make a summer resort of himself was a big hotel, a band
of music, and an ocean. But in spite of all this he didn't want to go to
bed, and he had apparently made up his mind that he wasn't going to
want to go to bed for some time to come; and as his papa was in an
unusually indulgent mood, the little fellow was permitted to nestle up
close under his left arm and sit there on his lap in the library after
dinner, while his mamma read aloud an article in one of the magazines on
the subject of dream poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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