Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Children's stories, American; Fantasy literature; Short stories, American
"Yes. And a Dwarf, too," said the other with a nod. "The Giant was a
Dude Giant, who cared more for his hats than he did for anything else in
the world. It was quite natural, too, that he should, for he had a finer
chance to show them off than most people have, because he had no less
than four heads, which is very remarkable for a Dude Giant, because
dudes who are not giants very rarely have even one head worth
mentioning. Hats were about the only things the Dude Giant cared for at
all. He used to buy every style of head-gear he could find, and it took
almost all of the salary he received at the Museum where he was on
exhibition to pay for them; but he was particularly fond of silk hats.
Of these he had twenty-eight; four for each day of the week, those for
Sunday being especially handsome and costly.
"Now it happened that in the same exhibition with the Dude Giant there
was a Dwarf named Tiny W. Littlejohn--W standing for Wee, which was his
middle name. He was a very good-natured fellow, Tiny was, and as far as
he knew he hadn't an enemy in the world. He was so very nice that
everybody who came to the exhibition brought him cream cakes, and
picture books, and roller skates, and other beautiful things, and nobody
ever thought of going away without buying his photograph, paying him
twenty-five cents extra for the ones with his autograph on, which his
mother wrote for him. In this way the Dwarf soon grew to be a
millionaire, while the Dude Giant squandered all he had on riotous hats,
and so remained as poor as when he started. For a long time everything
went smoothly at the Exhibition. There were no jealousies or quarrels of
any sort, except between the Glass Eater and the man who made Glass
Steamboats, and that was smoothed over in a very short time by the Glass
Eater saying that the Glass-blower made the finest crystal pies he had
ever tasted. But contentment and peace could not last forever in an
establishment where one attraction was growing richer and richer every
day as the Dwarf was, while another, the Dude Giant, was no better off
than the day he joined the show, and when finally the Dwarf began to
come every morning in a cab of his own, drawn by a magnificent gray
horse with a banged tail, and to dress better even than the proprietor
of the Museum himself, the Dude Giant became very envious, and when the
Dude Giant gets envious he is a very disagreeable person. For instance,
when no one was looking he would make horrible faces at Tiny, contorting
his four mouths and noses and eight cheeks all at once in a very
terrifying manner, and when he'd look cross-eyed at the Dwarf with all
eight of his eyes poor Tiny would get so nervous that he would try to
eat the roller skates and picture books, instead of the cream cakes
people brought him, and on one occasion he broke two of his prettiest
teeth doing it, which marred his personal appearance very much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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