Monkey Faces on the Monkey Wrenches Left-Handed Monkey Wrenches Potato Face Blind Man Ax Me No Questions Johnny the Wham Joe the Wimp Grasshoppers Thousand Dollar Bills Brass Doors Lizzie Lazarus [Illustration] How Googler and Gaggler, the Two Christmas Babies, Came Home with Monkey Wrenches 1 Two babies came one night in snowstorm weather, came to a tar paper shack on a cinder patch next the railroad yards on the edge of the Village of Liver-and-Onions. The family doctor came that night, came with a bird of a spizz car throwing a big spotlight of a headlight through the snow of the snowstorm on the prairie. “Twins,” said the doctor. “Twins,” said the father and mother. And the wind as it shook the tar paper shack and shook the doors and the padlocks on the doors of the tar paper shack, the wind seemed to be howling softly, “Twins, twins.” Six days and Christmas Eve came. The mother of the twins lit two candles, two little two-for-a-nickel candles in each little window. And the mother handed the father the twins and said, “Here are your Christmas presents.” The father took the two baby boys and laughed, “Twice times twice is twice.” The two little two-for-a-nickel candles sputtered in each little window that Christmas Eve, and at last sputtered and went out, leaving the prairies dark and lonesome. The father and the mother of the twins sat by the window, each one holding a baby. Every once in a while they changed babies so as to hold a different twin. And every time they changed they laughed at each other, “Twice times twice is twice.” One baby was called Googler, the other Gaggler. The two boys grew up, and hair came on their bald red heads. Their ears, wet behind, got dry. They learned how to pull on their stockings and shoes and tie their shoestrings. They learned at last how to take a handkerchief and hold it open and blow their noses. Their father looked at them growing up and said, “I think you’ll make a couple of peanut-wagon men pouring hot butter into popcorn sacks.” The family doctor saw the rashes and the itches and the measles and the whooping cough come along one year and another. He saw the husky Googler and the husky Gaggler throw off the rashes and the itches and the measles and the whooping cough. And the family doctor said, “They will go far and see much, and they will never be any good for sitting with the sitters and knitting with the knitters.”