"Oh, that would be lovely!" said Jimmieboy. "I'd just like to see you with two humps on your back--one for me, and one for my little brother." "Dear me!" said a gruff voice at Jimmieboy's side--"Dear me! The idea of a boy of your age, with two sets of alphabet picture blocks and a dictionary right in the house, not knowing that a dromedary has only one hump! Ridiculous! Next thing you'll be trying to say that the one-eyed catteraugus has two eyes." Jimmieboy leaned over the arm of the chair to see who it could be that spoke. It wasn't his father, that much was certain, because his father had often said that it wasn't possible to do more than three things at once, and he was now doing that many--smoking a cigar, reading a book, and playing with the locket on the end of his watch-chain. "Who are you, anyhow?" said Jimmieboy, as he peered over the arm, and saw nothing but the Dictionary. "I'm myself--that's who," was the answer, and then Jimmieboy was interested to see that it was nothing less than the Dictionary itself that had addressed him. "You ought to be more careful about the way you talk," added the Dictionary. "Your diction is airy without being dictionary, if you know what that means, which you don't, as the Rose remarked to the Cauliflower, when the Cauliflower said he'd be a finer Rose than the Rose if he smelled as sweet." "I'm very sorry," Jimmieboy replied, meekly, "I forgot that the dromedary only had one hump." "I don't believe you'd know a dromedary from a milk dairy if they both stood before you," retorted the Dictionary. "Now would you?" "Yes, I think I would," said Jimmieboy. "The milk dairy would have cream in bottles in its windows, and the dromedary wouldn't." "Ah, but you don't know why!" sang the Dictionary. "You don't even begin to know why the dromedary wouldn't have cream in bottles in its windows." "No," said Jimmieboy, "I don't. Why wouldn't he?" "Because he has no windows," laughed the Dictionary; "and between you and me, that's one of the respects in which the dromedary is like a base-drum--there isn't a solitary window in either of 'em." "You know a terrible lot, don't you?" said Jimmieboy, patronizingly. "Terrible isn't the word. I'm simply hideously learned," said the Dictionary. "Why, I've been called a vocabulary, I know so many words." "I wish you'd tell me all you know," said Jimmieboy, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair, and putting his chin on the palms of his two hands. "I'd like to know more than papa does--just for once. Do you know enough to tell me anything he doesn't know?" "Do I?" laughed the Dictionary. "Well, don't I? Rather. Why, I'm telling him things all the time. He came and asked me the other night what raucous meant, and how to spell macrobiotic." "And did you really know?" asked Jimmieboy, full of admiration for this wonderful creature.