" If you could have
seen the old, funny twinkle in her eye, when I found her with the
stereoscope, you would have thought she was a real, live Chicken, sure
enough.
"Now, then, you've got to tell me a story," she said.
"'_Got to_' don't tell stories."
"Well, p'ease tell me one, then."
"Yes," said Sunbeam, peeping in, "about the Great Panjandrum himself."
"Ah! you little mink," I said, "how did you get hold of my secret?"
"Why, I knew it all the time."
Now, you see, the case was this; I did not know that the children
understood where the names of the Garuly and the Joblily, and the
Pickaninny came from. But Sunbeam, who dips a little here and there into
a great many books, and who never forgets anything she hears, had somehow
gotten hold of my secret. It was this. There was a man who could repeat
whatever he read once. One of his friends undertook to write something
that he could not remember. So he wrote nonsense, and the man with the
long memory failed to remember it. The nonsense, which I read when I was
a boy, is, if I remember it rightly, as follows:
"She went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and
a great she-bear coming down the street thrust his head into the shop.
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