touch from the elastic man, your clothes which touch you likewise
become perfectly elastic. So no matter how mussed they get, they
promptly straighten out again to the condition they were in when you
touched the elastic man.

If you notice that your shoe lace was untied just before you became
elastic, and you now try to tie it and tuck it in, you find it most
unmanageable. It insists upon flying out of your shoe and springing
untied again.

Perhaps your hair was mussed before you became elastic. Now it is
impossible to comb it straight; each hair springs back like a fine
steel wire.

If you take a handkerchief from your pocket to wipe your perspiring
brow, you find that it does not stay unfolded. As soon as it is spread
out on your hand, it snaps back to the shape and the folds it had
while in your pocket.

Suppose you bounce up into an automobile for a ride. The automobile,
now being made elastic by your magic touch, bounds up into the air
at the first bump it strikes, and thereafter it goes hopping down the
street in a most distressing manner, bouncing off the ground like a
rubber ball each time it comes down. And each time it bumps you are
thrown off the seat into the air.

You find it hard to stay in any new position. Your body always
tends to snap back to the position you were in when you first became
elastic. If you touch a trotting horse and it becomes elastic,
the poor animal finds that his legs always straighten out to their
trotting position, whether he wants to walk or stand still or lie
down.

Imagine the plight of a boy pitching a ball, or some one yawning and
stretching, or a clown turning a somersault, if you touch each of
these just in the act and make him elastic. Their bodies always tend
to snap back to these positions. Whenever the clown wants to rest, he
has to get in the somersault position. The boy pitcher sleeps in the
position of "winding up" to throw the ball. The one who was yawning
and stretching has to be always on the alert, because the instant he
stops holding himself in some other position, his mouth flies open,
his arms fly out, and every one thinks he is bored to death.

You might touch the clay that a sculptor is molding and make it
elastic. The sculptor can mold all he pleases, but the clay is like
rubber and always returns at once to its original shape.

If you make a tree elastic when a man is chopping it down, his ax
bounces back from the tree with such force as nearly t