l
have none; but their great-great-grandchildren will have wings again, for
every ninth generation can fly."

"How curious!" said Sukey.

Then the pickaninny found a swamp blackbird's nest, and showed her how
strangely it was made; then they climbed down the chimney of the
school-house, and he showed her how the chimney swallow glued her nest
together; and he coaxed a katydid to fiddle with his wings, that she
might see that. At last they entered the pumpkin patch.

"Well," said Sukey, "there's nothing curious here. I know all about
pumpkins."

With that the pickaninny commenced to jump up and down on one, but he was
so light that he could not break it. He kept jumping higher and higher;
now he was bouncing up ten feet in the air, then fifteen, then twenty,
until at last he leaped up as high as the top of the oak-tree, and coming
down, he struck his heels through the pumpkin. Sukey laughed till the
tears ran off her chin. The pickaninny thrust his arm in and took out a
seed. Then breaking that open, he showed Susan that the inside of a
pumpkin seed was two white leaves, the first leaves of the young pumpkin
vine. And so an hour passed while the pickaninny showed her many curious
things, of which I have not time to tell you.

At last he said, "Now, Sukey Gray, pray let me fly away!"

"I shall not keep you if you want to go," said Susan.

"Then pluck the mistletoe, and let me go."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I cannot go until you pluck the mistletoe."

Sukey pulled a piece of mistletoe from the limb where they were standing,
and he bowed and said,

"Now, Sukey Gray, good-day. Don't waste your sighs, but use your eyes."

With that he leaped into the air. Susy looked up, but there was only the
bluejay, crying, "Jay! jay! jay!" in a peevish way, and herself looking
out the window.

"What a wonderful country the White-Oak Flats must be," she said. And the
more she used her eyes, the more she was satisfied that the Hoop-Pole
Country was the most wonderful in the world.

THE GREAT PANJANDRUM HIMSELF.

Chicken Little was a picture, sitting on the floor by the window, with a
stereoscope--"the thing 'at you look fru," she calls it--in her hand, and
the pictures scattered about her.

Now some of the children think that I have been "making up" Chicken
Little, and that there is no such a being. A few weeks ago, after I had
been talking to a great church full of people, there came