Mollie and the Unwiseman

"Dear me!" said Whistlebinkie. "That was too bad."

"Wasn't it!" sighed the Unwiseman. "It was such a beautifully long poem – and what's more, it isn't easy work. It's almost as hard as shoveling snow, only, of course, you get better pay for it."

"You can rewrite it, can't you?" asked Mollie, gazing sadly at the havoc Gyp had wrought in the Unwiseman's work.

"I am afraid not," said the Unwiseman. "My disappointment has driven it quite out of my head. I can only remember the title."

"What did you call it?" asked Mollie.

"It was a simple little title," replied the Unwiseman. "It was called 'A Poem, by Me.'"

"And what was it about?" asked Mollie.

"About six hundred verses," said the Unwiseman; "and not one of 'em has escaped that dog. Those that he hasn't spoiled with his paws he has wagged his tail on, and he chose the best one of the lot to lie on his back and wiggle on. It's very discouraging."

"I'm very sorry," said Mollie; "and if you want me to I'll punish Gyp."

"What good would that do me?" queried the Unwiseman. "If chaining him up would restore even half the poem, I'd say go ahead and chain him up; but it won't. The poem's gone, and there's nothing left for me to do but go in the house and stick my head out of the window and cry."

"Perhaps you can write another poem," said Mollie.

"That's true – I hadn't thought of that," said the Unwiseman. "But I don't think I'd better to-day. I've lost more money by the destruction of that first poem than I can afford. If I should have another ruined to-day, I'd be bankrupt."

"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do," said Mollie. "I'll ask papa to let me give you a lead-pencil and a pad to write your next poem on. How will that do?"

"I should be very grateful," said the Unwiseman; "and if with these he could give me a few dozen ideas and a rhyming dictionary it would be a great help."

"I'll ask him," said Mollie. "I'll ask him right away, and I haven't any doubt that he'll say yes, because he always gives me things I want if they aren't harmful."

"Very well," said the Unwiseman. "And you may tell him for me, Miss Whistlebinkie, that I'll show him how grateful I am to him and to you for your kind assistance by letting him have the first thousand yards of poetry I write for his paper at fifty cents a yard, which is just half what I shall make other people pay for them."

And so Mollie and Whistlebinkie bade the Unwiseman good-by for the time being, and went home. As Mollie had predicted, her father was very glad to give her the pencil and the pad and a rhyming dictionary; but as he had no ideas to spare at the moment he had to deny the little maid that part of the request.

What the Unwiseman did with the pad and the pencil and the dictionary I shall tell you in the next chapter.

IX

The Poems of the Unwiseman

In which Mollie Listens to Some Remarkable Verses

A few days after he had received the pencil and pad and rhyming dictionary from Mollie, the Unwiseman wrote to his little benefactress and asked her to visit him as soon as she could.

"I've written eight pounds of poetry," he said in his letter, "and I'd like to know what you think of some of it. I've given up the idea of selling it by the yard because it uses up so much paper, and I'm going to put it out at a dollar a pound. If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to have you tell your papa about this and ask him if he hasn't any heavier paper than the lot he sent me. If he could let me have a million sheets of paper twice as heavy as the other I could write a pound of sonnits in half the time, and could accordingly afford to give them to him a little cheaper for use in his newspaper. I'd have been up to see you last night, but somehow or other my house got moved out to Illinois, which was too far away. It is back again in New York this morning, however, so that you won't find any trouble in getting him to see the poetry, and, by the way, while I think of it, I wish you'd ask your papa if Illinois rhymes with boy or boys. I want to write a poem about Illinois, but I don't know whether to begin it with

"'O, the boys,Of Illinois,They utterly upset my equipoise';"'O, thou boy,Of Illinois!My peace of mind thou dust destroy?'

"You see, my dear, it is important to know at the start whether you are writing about one boy or several boys; and that rhyming dictionary you sent me doesn't say anything about such a contiguity. You might ask him, too, what is the meaning of contiguity. It's a word I admire, and I want to work it in somewhere where it will not only look well, but make a certain amount of sense.

"Yoors tooly,"Me."

It was hardly to be expected, after an invitation of this sort, that Mollie should delay visiting the Unwiseman for an instant, so summoning Whistlebinkie and Gyp, she and her two little friends started out, and ere long they caught sight of the Unwiseman's house, standing on one corner of the village square, and in front of it was a peculiar looking booth, something like a banana-stand in its general outlines. This was covered from top to bottom with placards, which filled Mollie with uncontrollable mirth, when she saw what was printed on them. Here is what some of them said:

GO TO ME'S FOR POTERY

This was the most prominent of the placards, and was nailed to the top of the booth. On the right side of this was:

LISENSED TO SELL SONNITSON THE PREMISSES

Off to the left, printed in red crayon, the curious old man had tacked this:

EPIKS WROTE WHILEYOU WEIGHT

Besides these signs, on the counter of this little stand were arranged a dozen or more piles of manuscript, and behind each of these piles were short sticks holding up small cards marked "five cents an ounce," "ten cents a pound," and back of all a larger card, which read:

SPESHUL DISSCOUNTS TO ALLCOSTUMERS ORDERINGBY THE TUN

"This looks like business," said Whistlebinkie.

"Yes," said Mollie, with a laugh. "Like the peanut business."

Gyp said nothing for a moment, but after sniffing it all over began to growl at a placard at the base of the stand on which was drawn by the Unwiseman's unmistakable hand the picture of two small dogs playing together with a line to this effect:

DOGGERELL A SPESHIALITY

As Mollie and Whistlebinkie were reading these signs the door of the Unwiseman's house was opened and the proprietor appeared. He smiled pleasantly when he saw who his visitors were, although if Mollie had been close enough to him to hear it she might have noticed that he gave a little sigh.

"I didn't recognize you at first," he said; "I thought you might be customers, and I delayed coming out so that you wouldn't think I was too anxious to sell my wares. Of course, I am very anxious to sell 'em, but it don't do to let the public know that. Let 'em understand that you are willing to sell and they'll very likely buy; but if you come tumbling out of your house pell-mell every time anybody stops to see what you've got they'll think maybe you aren't well off, and they'll either beat you down or not buy at all."

"Aren't you afraid of being robbed though?" Mollie asked.

"Oh, I wouldn't mind being robbed," replied the Unwiseman. "It would be a good thing for me if somebody would steal a pound or two of my poems. That would advertise my business. I can't afford to advertise my business, but if I should be robbed it would be news, and, of course, the newspapers would be full of it. Your father doesn't know of any kind-hearted burglar who's temporarily out of work who'd be willing to rob a poor man without charge does he?"

"No," said Mollie, "I don't think papa knows any burglars at all. We have literary men, and editors, and men like that visiting the house all the time, but so far we haven't had any burglars."

"Well, I suppose I'll have to trust to luck for 'em," sighed the Unwiseman; "though it would be a great thing if an extra should come out with great big black headlines, and newsboys yelling 'em out all over the country, 'The Unwiseman's Potery Stand Visited by Burglars! Eight Pounds of Triolets Missing! The Police on the Track of the Plunderers!'"

"It would be a splendid advertisement," said Mollie. "But I'm afraid you'll be a long time getting it. Have you any poems to show me?"

"Yes," said the Unwiseman, running his eye over his stock. "Yes, indeed, I have. Here's one I like very much. Shall I read it to you?"

"Yes, if you will," said Mollie. "What is it about?"

"It's about three dozen to the pound, the way I weigh it," replied the Unwiseman. "It's called 'My Wish, and Why I Wish It.'"

"That's an awfully long name, isn't it?" said Mollie.

"Yes, but it makes the poem a little heavier," replied the old man. "I've made up a little for its length, too, by making the poem short. It's only a quartrain. Here's how it goes:

"I wish the sun would shine at night,Instead of in the day, dear,For that would make the evenings bright,And day time would be shadier!"

"Why, that isn't bad!" cried Mollie.

"No," returned the Unwiseman. "I didn't try to make it bad, though I could have if I'd wanted to. But there's a great thing about the thought in that poem, and if you'll only look into it you'll see how wonderful it is. It can be used over and over again without anybody's ever noticing that it's been used before. Here's another poem with just the same idea running through it:

"I wish the oceans all were dry,And arid deserts were not land, dear,If we could walk on oceans – My!And sail on deserts, 'twould be handier."

"How is that the same idea?" asked Mollie, a little puzzled to catch the Unwiseman's point.

"Why, the whole notion is that you wish things were as they aren't, that's all; and when you consider how many things there are in the world that are as they are and aren't as they aren't, you get some notion as to how many poems you can make out of that one idea. For instance, children hate to go to bed at night, preferring to fall asleep on the library rug. So you might have this:

"I wish that cribs were always rugs,'Twould fill me chock up with delight,For then, like birds and tumble-bugs,I'd like to go to bed at night."

"Tumble-bugs don't like to go to bed at night," said Mollie. "They like to buzz around and hit their heads against the wall."

"I know that; but I have two excuses for using tumble-bugs in that rhyme. In the first place, I haven't written that rhyme yet, and so it can't be criticized. It's only what the dictionary people would call extemporious. I made it up on the spur of the moment, and from that standpoint it's rather clever. The other excuse is that even if I had written it as I spoke it, poets are allowed to say things they don't exactly mean, as long as in general they bring out their idea clearly enough to give the reader something to puzzle over."

"Well, I suppose you know what you mean," said Mollie, more mystified than ever. "Have you got any more poems?"

"Yes. Here's a new bit of Mother Goose I've dashed off:

"Namby Pamby sat on the fence,Namby Pamby tumbled from thence.Half the queen's donkeys, her dog, and her cat,Could not restore Namby to where he was at."

"Why!" cried Mollie. "You can't write that. It's nothing but Humpty Dumpty all over again."

"You're all wrong there," retorted the Unwiseman. "And I can prove it. You say that I can't write that. Well, I have written it, which proves that I can. As for its being Humpty Dumpty all over again, that's plain nonsense. Namby Pamby is not Humpty Dumpty. Namby Pamby begins with an N and a P, while Humpty Dumpty begins with H and D. Then, again, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. My hero sat on a fence. Humpty Dumpty fell. Namby Pamby tumbled – and so it goes all through the poem. Mine is entirely different. Besides, it's a hysterical episode, and I've got just as much right to make poems about hystery as Mother Goose had."

"Maybe you're right," said Mollie. "But if I were you, I wouldn't write things that are too much like what other people have written."

"I don't see why," said the Unwiseman, impatiently. "If Peter Smith writes a poem that everybody likes and buys, I want to write something as much like what Peter Smith has made a fortune out of as Peter Smith has. That's the point. But we won't quarrel about it. Girls don't know much about business, and men do. I'm a man and you're only a girl."

"Well, I think Mollie's right," put in Whistlebinkie.

"You have to," retorted the Unwiseman. "If you didn't, she'd pack you up in a box and send you out to the sheathen."

"The what?" asked Mollie.

"The sheathen. Little girl savages. I call 'em sheathen to extinguish them from heathen, who are, as I understand it, little boy savages," explained the Unwiseman. "But what do you think of this for a poem. It's called Night, and you mustn't laugh at it because it is serious:

"Oh night, dear night, in street and park,Where'er thou beest thou'rt always dark.Thou dustent change, O sweet brunette,No figgleness is thine, you bet.And what I love the best, on land or sea,Is absence of the vice of figglety."

"What's figglety?" asked Mollie.

"Figglety?" echoed the Unwiseman. "Don't you know that? Figglety is figgleness, or the art of being figgle."

"But I don't know what being figgle is," said Mollie.

"Hoh!" sneered the Unwiseman, angry at Mollie's failure to understand and to admire his serious poem. "Where have you been brought up? Figgle is changing. If you pretend to like pie to-day better than anything, and change around to pudding to-morrow, you are figgle. Some people spell it fickle, but somehow or other I like figgle better. It's a word of my own, figgle is, while fickle is a word everybody uses – but I won't argue with you any more," he added with an impatient gesture. "You've found fault with almost everything I've done, and I'm not going to read any more to you. It's discouraging enough to have people pass you by and not buy your poems, without reading 'em to a little girl that finds fault with 'em, backed up in her opinion by a pug dog and a rubber doll like Whistlebinkie. Some time, when you are better natured, I'll read more to you, but now I won't."

Saying which, the Unwiseman turned away and walked into his house, banging the door behind him in a way which plainly showed that he was offended.

Mollie and Whistlebinkie and Gyp went silently home, very unhappy about the Unwiseman's temper, but, though they did not know it, they were very fortunate to get away before the Unwiseman discovered that the mischievous Gyp had chewed up three pounds of sonnets while their author was reading his poem "Night," so that on the whole, I think, they were to be congratulated that things turned out as they did.

X

The Unwiseman's Luncheon

In which the Unwiseman makes Some Sensible Remarks on Eating

Whistlebinkie, said Mollie, one morning in the early spring, "it's been an awful long time since we saw the Unwiseman."

"Thasso," whistled Whistlebinkie. "I wonder what's become of him."

"I can't even guess," said Mollie. "I asked papa the other morning if he had seen any of his poetry in print and he said he hadn't so far as he knew, although he had read several books of poetry lately that sounded as if he'd written them. I say we go out and try to find him."

"Thasoots me," said Whistlebinkie.

"What's that?" said Mollie. "You still talk through the top of your hat so much that I really can't make out what you say half the time."

"I forgot," said Whistlebinkie, meekly. "What I meant to say was that that suits me. I'd like very much to see him again and hear some of his poetry."

"I don't much think he's stayed in that business," observed Mollie. "He's had time enough to be in sixteen different kinds of businesses since we saw him, and I'm pretty certain that he's tried eight of them any how."

"I guess may be so," said Whistlebinkie. "He's a great tryer, that old Unwiseman."

Mollie donned her new spring hat and Whistlebinkie treated his face and hands to a dash of cold water, after which they started out.

"It's the same old question now," said Mollie, as she stood on the street corner, wondering which way to turn. "Where would we better go to find him?"

"Well, it seems to me," said Whistlebinkie, after a moment's thought, "it seems to me that we'd better look for him in just the same place he was in the last time we saw him."

"I don't see why," returned Mollie. "We never did that before."

"That's why," explained Whistlebinkie. "He's such an unaccountable old man that he's sure to turn up where you least expected him. Now, as I look at it, the place where we least expect to find him is where he was before. Therefore I say let's go there."

"You're pretty wise after all, Whistlebinkie," said Mollie, with an approving nod. "We'll go there."

And it turned out that Whistlebinkie was right.

The house of the Unwiseman was found standing in precisely the same place in which they had last seen it, but pasted upon the front door was a small placard which read, "Gawn to Lunch. Will be Back in Eight Weeks."

"Dear me!" cried Whistlebinkie, as Mollie read the placard to him. "He must have been fearfully hungry to go to a lunch it will take that long to eat."

Mollie laughed. "I guess maybe I know him well enough to know what that means," she said. "It means that he's inside the house and doesn't want to be bothered by anybody. Let's go round to the back door and see if that is open."

This was no sooner said than done, but the back door, like the first, was closed. Like the front door, too, it bore a placard, but this one read, "As I said before, I've gone to lunch. If you want to know when I'll be back, don't bother about ringing the bell to ask me, for I shall not answer. Go round to the front door and find out for yourself. Yours tooly, the Unwiseman. P. S. I've given up the potery business, so if you're a editor, I don't want to see you any how; but if your name's Mollie, knock on the kitchen window and I'll let you in."

"I thought so," said Mollie. "He's inside."

Then the little girl tiptoed softly up to the kitchen window and peeped in, and there the old gentleman sat nibbling on a chocolate eclaire and looking as happy as could be.

Mollie tapped gently on the window, and the Unwiseman, hurriedly concealing his half-eaten eclaire in the folds of his newspaper, looked anxiously toward the window to see who it might be that had disturbed him. When he saw who it was his face wreathed with smiles, and rushing to the window he threw it wide open.

"Come right in," he cried. "I'm awfully glad to see you."

"I can't climb in this way," said Mollie. "Can't you open the door?"

"Can't possibly," said the Unwiseman. "Both doors are locked. I've lost the keys. You can't open doors without keys, you know. That's why I lost them. I'm safe from burglars now."

"But why don't you get new keys?" said Mollie.

"What's the use? I know where I lost the others, and when my eight weeks' absence is up I can find them again. New keys would only cost money, and I'm not so rich that I can spend money just for the fun of it," said the Unwiseman.

"Then, I suppose, I can't come in at all," said Mollie.

"Oh, yes, you can," said the Unwiseman. "Have you an Alpine stock?"

"What's that?" said Mollie.

"Ho!" jeered the Unwiseman. "What's an Alpine stock! Ha, ha! Not to know that; I thought little girls knew everything."

"Well, they do generally," said Mollie, resolved to stand up for her kind. "But I'm not like all little girls. There are some things I don't know."

"I guess there are," said the Unwiseman, with a superior air. "You don't know what rancour means, or fixity, or garrulousness."

"No, I don't," Mollie admitted. "What do they mean?"

"I'm not in the school-teacher business, and so I shan't tell you," said the Unwiseman, with a wave of his hand. "Besides, I really don't know myself – though I'm not a little girl. But I'll tell you one thing. An Alpine stock is a thing to climb Alps with, and a thing you can climb an Alp with ought to help you climbing into a kitchen window, because kitchen windows aren't so high as Alps, and they don't have snow on 'em in spring like Alps do."

"Oh," said Mollie. "That's it – is it? Well, I haven't got one, and I don't know where to get one, so I can't get in that way."

"Then there's only two things we can do," observed the Unwiseman. "Either I must send for a carpenter and have him build a new door or else I'll have to lend you a step-ladder. I guess, on the whole, the step-ladder is cheaper. It's certainly not so noisy as a carpenter. However, I'll let you choose. Which shall it be?"

"The step-ladder, I guess," said Mollie. "Have you got one?"

"No," returned the Unwiseman; "but I have a high-chair which is just as good. I always keep a high-chair in case some one should bring a baby here to dinner. I'd never ask any one to do that, but unexpected things are always happening, and I like to be prepared. Here it is."

Saying which the Unwiseman produced a high-chair and lowered it to the ground. Upon this Mollie and Whistlebinkie climbed up to the window-ledge, and were shortly comfortably seated inside this strange old man's residence.

"I see you've given up the poetry business," said Mollie, after a pause.

"Yes," said the Unwiseman. "I couldn't make it pay. Not that I couldn't sell all I could write, but that I couldn't write all that I could sell. You see, people don't like to be disappointed, and I had to disappoint people all the time. I couldn't turn out all they wanted. Two magazine editors sent in orders for their winter poetry. Ten tons apiece they ordered, and I couldn't deliver more than two tons apiece to 'em. That made them mad, and they took their trade elsewhere – and so it went. I disappointed everybody, and finally I found myself writing poetry for my own amusement, and as it wasn't as amusing as some other things, I gave it up."

"But what ever induced you to put out that sign, saying that you wouldn't be back for eight weeks?" asked Mollie.

"I didn't say that," said the Unwiseman. "I said I would be back in eight weeks. I shall be. What I wanted was to be able to eat my lunch undisturbed. I've been eating it for five weeks now, and at the end of three weeks I shall be through."

"It musterbin a big lunch," said Whistlebinkie.

"I don't know any such word as musterbin," said the Unwiseman, severely; "but as for the big lunch, it was big. One whole eclaire."

"I could eat an eclaire in five seconds," said Mollie.

"No doubt of it," retorted the Unwiseman. "So could I; but I know too much for that. I believe in getting all the enjoyment out of a thing that I can; and what's the sense of gobbling all the pleasure out of an eclaire in five seconds when you can spread it over eight weeks? That's a queer thing about you wise people that I can't understand. When you have something pleasant on hand you go scurrying through it as though you were afraid somebody was going to take it away from you. You don't make things last as you should ought to."

"Excuse me," interrupted Whistlebinkie, who had been criticized so often about the way he spoke, that he was resolved to get even. "Is 'should ought to' a nice way to speak?"

"It's nice enough for me," retorted the Unwiseman. "And as this is my house I have a right to choose the language I speak here. If you want to speak some other language, you can go outside and speak it."

Poor Whistlebinkie squeaked out an apology and subsided.

"Take bananas, for instance," said the Unwiseman, not deigning to notice Whistlebinkie's apology. "I dare say if your mother gives you a banana, you go off into a corner and gobble it right up. Now I find that a nibble tastes just as good as a bite, and by nibbling you can get so many more tastes out of that banana, as nibbles are smaller than bites, and instead of a banana lasting a week, or two weeks or eight weeks, it's all gone in ten seconds. You might do the same thing at the circus and be as sensible as you are when you gobble your banana. If the clown cracked his jokes and the trapezuarius trapozed, and the elephants danced, and the bare-back riders rode their horses all at once, you'd have just as much circus as you get the way you do it now, only it wouldn't be so pleasant. Pleasure, after all, is like butter, and it ought to be spread. You wouldn't think of eating a whole pat of butter at one gulp, so why should you be greedy about your pleasure?"