the Blue Silver Girls. They tumbled down at my
feet because, you see, the toboggan ended right at my feet. I could
lean over and pick up the White Gold Boys and the Blue Silver Girls as
they slid out of the toboggan at my feet. I could pick up a whole
handful of them and hold them in my hand and talk with them. Yet, you
understand, whenever I tried to shut my hand and keep any of them they
would snizzle and sniffer and jump out of the cracks between my
fingers. Once there was a little gold and silver dust on my left hand
thumb, dust they snizzled out while slipping away from me.

"Once I heard a White Gold Boy and a Blue Silver Girl whispering. They
were standing on the tip of my right hand little finger, whispering.
One said, 'I got pumpkins--what did you get?' The other said, 'I got
hazel nuts.' I listened more and I found out there are millions of
pumpkins and millions of hazel nuts so small you and I can not see
them. These children from the moon, however, they can see them and
whenever they slide down on the moon toboggan they take back their
pockets full of things so little we have never seen them."

"They are wonderful children," said Any Ice Today. "And will you tell
me how they get back to the moon after they slide down the toboggan?"

"Oh, that is easy," said Potato Face. "It is just as easy for them to
slide _up_ to the moon as to slide down. Sliding up and sliding down
is the same for them. The big white spiders fixed it that way when
they snizzled and sniffered and made the toboggan."

[Illustration]

How Gimme the Ax Found Out About
the Zigzag Railroad and Who Made
It Zigzag

One day Gimme the Ax said to himself, "Today I go to the postoffice
and around, looking around. Maybe I will hear about something
happening last night when I was sleeping. Maybe a policeman began
laughing and fell in a cistern and came out with a wheelbarrow full of
goldfish wearing new jewelry. How do I know? Maybe the man in the moon
going down a cellar stairs to get a pitcher of butter-milk for the
woman in the moon to drink and stop crying, maybe he fell down the
stairs and broke the pitcher and laughed and picked up the broken
pieces and said to himself, 'One, two, three, four, accidents happen
in the best regulated families.' How do I know?"

So with his mind full of simple and refreshing thoughts, Gimme the Ax
went out int