please," pleaded the boy, rising to resume the journey.
"Let us be good comrades and as happy and cheerful as possible, for we
are likely to meet with plenty of trouble on our way."

It was nearly sundown when they came to the edge of the forest and saw
spread out before them a delightful landscape. There were broad blue
fields stretching for miles over the valley, which was dotted
everywhere with pretty, blue domed houses, none of which, however, was
very near to the place where they stood. Just at the point where the
path left the forest stood a tiny house covered with leaves from the
trees, and before this stood a Munchkin man with an axe in his hand. He
seemed very much surprised when Ojo and Scraps and the Glass Cat came
out of the woods, but as the Patchwork Girl approached nearer he sat
down upon a bench and laughed so hard that he could not speak for a
long time.

This man was a woodchopper and lived all alone in the little house. He
had bushy blue whiskers and merry blue eyes and his blue clothes were
quite old and worn.

"Mercy me!" exclaimed the woodchopper, when at last he could stop
laughing. "Who would think such a funny harlequin lived in the Land of
Oz? Where did you come from, Crazy-quilt?"

"Do you mean me?" asked the Patchwork Girl.

"Of course," he replied.

"You misjudge my ancestry. I'm not a crazy-quilt; I'm patchwork," she
said.

"There's no difference," he replied, beginning to laugh again. "When my
old grandmother sews such things together she calls it a crazy-quilt;
but I never thought such a jumble could come to life."

"It was the Magic Powder that did it," explained Ojo.

"Oh, then you have come from the Crooked Magician on the mountain. I
might have known it, for--Well, I declare! here's a glass cat. But the
Magician will get in trouble for this; it's against the law for anyone
to work magic except Glinda the Good and the royal Wizard of Oz. If you
people--or things--or glass spectacles--or crazy-quilts--or whatever
you are, go near the Emerald City, you'll be arrested."

"We're going there, anyhow," declared Scraps, sitting upon the bench
and swinging her stuffed legs.

"If any of us takes a rest,
We'll be arrested sure,
And get no restitution
'Cause the rest we must endure."

"I see," said the woodchopper, nodding; "you're as crazy as the
crazy-quilt you're made of."

"She really is crazy," remarked the Glass Cat. "But that isn't to be
wondered at whe