"Well, meanness is my business," said the dwarf. "Your business?" echoed Jimmieboy, opening his eyes wide with astonishment, meanness seemed such a strange business. "Certainly," returned the dwarf. "Don't you know what I am? I am an unfairy." "What's that?" asked Jimmieboy. "You know what a fairy is, don't you?" said the dwarf. "Yes. It's a dear lovely creature with wings, that goes about doing good." "That's right. An unfairy is just the opposite," explained the dwarf. "I go about doing unfair things. I am the fairy that makes things go wrong. When your hat blows off in the street the chances are that I have paid the bellows man, who works up all these big winds we have, to do it. If I see people having a good time on a picnic, I fly up to the sky and push a rain cloud over where they are and drench them, having first of course either hidden or punched great holes in their umbrellas. Oh, I can tell you, I am the meanest creature that ever was. Why, do you know what I did once in a country school?" "No, I don't," said Jimmieboy, in tones of disgust. "I don't know anything about mean things." "Well, you ought to know about this," returned the dwarf, "because it was just the meanest thing anybody ever did. There was a boy who'd studied awfully hard in hopes that he would lead his class when the holidays came, and there was another boy in the school who was equal to him in everything but arithmetic, and who would have been beaten on that one point, so that the other boy would have stood where he wanted to, only I helped the second boy by rubbing out all the correct answers of the first boy and putting others on the slate instead, so that the first boy lost first place and had to take second. Wasn't that mean?" "It was horrid," said Jimmieboy, "and it's a good thing you didn't come down here when I asked you to, for if you had, I think I should now be slapping you just as hard as I could."