Posts filed under “Young Readers”
THE CAT WHO SAID ‘OOP OOP SPICKETY WICKETY HIGGLE WIGGLE SPLOT.’
ONCE THERE WAS a puppy whose mother loved him very much. She taught him how to wag his tail and how to beg the people for food, which are the two best things a dog can know.
One day she decided to teach him about the other animals on the farm.
“You can tell what kind of animal it is by the sound it makes,” she told him.
The puppy tilted his head and lifted his ears. He loved sounds.
“A cow says ‘moo,’” his mother said. “Dogs are friends to cows, because they are very big and do not eat our food.”
“Moo,” the puppy repeated.
“A rooster says ‘cock-a-doodle-doo,’” his mother continued. “Dogs are friends to roosters, because roosters help guard the farm.”
The puppy tilted his head the other way to show he was still listening.
“A sheep says ‘baa,’” said the mother dog. “Sheep are a bit dim, but easy to get along with. Dogs are friends to sheep.”
“Baa,” the puppy repeated.
Now his mother’s face grew dark, and she spoke in grave tones. “A cat says ‘meow,’” she told him. “Dogs hate cats and chase them whenever we can, because cats are evil and manipulative, and they steal our food when we’re not looking. If you see a cat, you chase it.”
When the lesson was over, the puppy trotted off into the fields to play.
On the way, he met a cow.
“What kind of animal are you?” the puppy asked.
“Moo,” said the cow.
“You must be a cow,” the puppy said, “because you say ‘moo.’ My mother told me that dogs are friends to cows.” And he wagged his tail in a friendly way as he passed the cow.
Next he met a rooster. “What kind of animal are you?” the puppy asked.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” said the rooster.
“You must be a rooster,” the puppy said, “because you say ‘cock-a-doodle-doo.’ My mother told me that dogs are friends to roosters.” And he wagged his tail in a friendly way as he passed the rooster.
Next he met a sheep.
“What kind of animal are you?” the puppy asked.
“Baa,” said the sheep.
“You must be a sheep,” the puppy said, “because you say ‘baa.’ My mother told me that dogs are friends to sheep.” And he wagged his tail in a friendly way as he passed the sheep.
Next he met a cat.
“What kind of animal are you?” the puppy asked.
“Oop oop spickety wickety higgle wiggle splot,” said the cat.
“I’m sorry,” the puppy said. “I didn’t quite understand that.”
“Picka wacka quicka macka spuckle muckle fleep,” said the cat.
“This is very puzzling,” the puppy said. “You can’t be a cow, because cows say ‘moo.’”
“Ring rang vippity vop,” said the cat.
“And you can’t be a rooster, because roosters say ‘cock-a-doodle-doo,’” the puppy continued.
“Skee-beet zu-rack flack be dack wack vo vack,” said the cat.
“And you can’t be a sheep, because sheep say ‘baa.’”
“Blibber blap cobble snap,” said the cat.
“And you can’t be a cat, because cats say ‘meow.’”
“Bitterby batterby wittil drip,” said the cat.
“I’ll have to tell my mother that I’ve discovered a new kind of animal,” the puppy said. “Won’t she be proud of me!” And he wagged his tail in a friendly way as he passed the cat.
The cat watched the puppy romp off into the field. Then he turned and went back to his own mother, who had been watching from a patch of weeds.
“You see, it’s just as I told you,” said the mother cat. “Dogs are a bit dim, but easy to get along with.”
FOR YOUNG READERS.
THE SHOES THAT WENT FOR A WALK.
A Cautionary Tale for Young Readers.
BOBBY WAS PROUD to say he had a pair of good walking shoes.
But sometimes they were a little too good at walking. They would walk around the house all day, and Bobby had a hard time finding them when he needed them. They would walk around the house all night, going clomp, thump, whump and keeping Bobby and his mother and father awake.
“Maybe we should get you a new pair of shoes,” his mother would always say after a hard night of clomping, thumping, and whumping.
“But they are very good walking shoes,” Bobby would always reply, and they always left it at that.
One day when Bobby was at school, his feet started to itch. So he did the thing he should never have done: he took off his shoes to scratch the itch.
This was the chance the shoes had been waiting for. With a laugh, a jaunty tappa-tap, and a Bronx cheer, the shoes ran out of the room.
“Bobby has hammer-toes!” shouted little Mary, pointing at Bobby’s bare feet.
(Mary didn’t know what hammer-toes were, but she thought they sounded silly.)
In the mean time, the shoes had dashed out the front door and were merrily jogging up the road.
When they came to the old Simmons farm, they cut across the field. What fun to trot and scamper between the cornstalks! Soon the shoes were covered with mud, but they were having too much fun to care.
But all of a sudden a big orange cat leaped out from behind the corn. The cat pounced on the left shoe. It jumped and leaped and squiggled and squirmed and finally got away. But then the cat pounced on the right shoe. The right shoe was having a simply awful time until the left shoe hopped up from behind and kicked the cat. That startled the cat, and the shoes ran as fast as they could—right into a dog.
The dog looked down at them, and the shoes looked up at the dog. It was a very big dog, and the shoes were quaking in their boots, so to speak.
All at once the dog’s mouth came down and closed on the shoes. The dog lifted them up and ran—but where was he taking them? He ran through the fields and up to the farmhouse, where old Farmer Simmons was sitting on the porch whittling a ham radio.
“Good boy, Bismarck,” said Farmer Simmons to the dog. The dog dropped the shoes at his feet.
“But wait,” Farmer Simmons said. “These aren’t my shoes, you silly dog! They look like little Bobby’s from down the road.”
Now the shoes saw their chance. They ran down the porch steps and back across the field. Bismarck the dog chased after them, but they ran so fast that he lost them in the corn. When they got to the road, they ran even faster, and they kept running until they came right back to the school.
All the children stood up to watch as the shoes, covered with dirt and more than a little beaten up, walked back toward Bobby’s desk.
“Where have you two been?” Bobby asked them sternly.
But they said nothing, because the cat had got their tongues.
“Maybe you should get a new pair of shoes, Bobby,” said little Mary.
“But they are very good walking shoes,” Bobby said, and all the children had to agree that they were.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
The Z is for the Zymurgist,
who always comes in last,
And always will, to judge by
what has happened in the past.
When jobs are called by alphabet,
she seldom gets her share–
Which doesn’t bother her, because
she drinks too much to care.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
Y for the Yes-man, who longs to say “no”;
Alas and alack, in his job it’s prohibited.
Original thought
Is not what he’s here for,
So let’s give a cheer for
The Yes-man who really would like to say “no,” but does not.
The job is a hard one, as Yes-men all know:
His private opinions may not be exhibited.
His job is to say
What his bosses will pay for,
So let’s say hooray for
The Yes-man who’d rather say “no,” but says “yes” anyway.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
X for the Xylotomist, whose specialized profession
Is cutting bits of wood to fit into a microscope.
It’s more than just a job, she worries—now it’s an obsession.
She thinks she has become, she tells us, holding back her tears,
A xylotomic addict—maybe even worse, she fears—
And now, she says, to go cold turkey is her only hope.
But then who’ll cut our bits of wood to fit our microscope?
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
In Honor of the Letter W,
A Hymn to the Worker.
The Worker! How we love to sing his praises!
The Worker! How we hate to give him raises!
We praise him as the fount of every virtue,
And also ’cause his union pals can hurt you.
The Worker! He’s the hero of our story!
The Worker! His the fame and his the glory!
We gladly pay him tribute every Mayday,
As long as we don’t have to every payday.
It’s really best, although it may seem funny,
That he should work, and we should get the money:
For ’tis a truth that cannot be ignored
That Virtue ought to be its own reward.
THE BEAUTY AND THE SWANS.
From Dr. Boli’s Fables for Children Who Are Too Old to Believe in Fables.
A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG woman was taking a walk in the garden. She had just had a letter from her most ardent admirer, so she was more than usually conscious of her own beauty. It was very pleasant to stroll among the flowers, enjoying the soft breeze and turning over in her mind the many praises and endearments she had just read.
In a while she came down the steps to the pond, and there at the edge two graceful white swans floated, hardly rippling the water as they moved. She admired the beauty of the swans, but even more she admired her own beauty reflected in the still water.
“Indeed it is true,” she said to herself: “the comparison Montague made was a just one.” (Montague was the name of her most ardent admirer.) “For see, my complexion, how perfectly white it is! How like the plumage of the swan, the whitest of all birds! And the delicate grace of my carriage, how like the grace of these noble creatures!”
The swans looked back at her, almost as if they could understand what she was saying, and would add their praises to her own if they were but gifted with speech.
“And my neck,” she continued, touching her neck with her fingertips—“my neck, how slender like the swan’s, and how gracefully formed! Oh, Montague, what an artist you are, and what an accurate observer of nature!”
Still the swans gazed back at her; but the young woman had tired of this recreation and walked on toward the summer-house.
As she walked off, the male swan turned to the female.
“Did you ever see such a clumsy biped in your life?” he asked her.
“Indeed!” she agreed. “And that horrible mottled pink skin! It looks as though she’s been attacked by a fungus.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” the male concluded. “If I had a stumpy fat neck like that, I’d cut my own throat.”
MORAL: Comparisons are odious, at least to one side of the equation.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
V for the amateur Violinist,
Whose tone (regrettably) was the thinnest
That ever was heard from a violin.
You never heard anything quite so thin.
It was thinner than twigs or the legs of plovers,
Thinner than models on magazine covers;
Thinner than greyhounds, thinner than whippets;
Thinner than hairs or the tiniest snippets
Of fur from a vole or a shrew or a bat:
Whatever you think, it was thinner than that.
At last, one day, his friends took him aside
And explained why they all seemed to run and hide
Whenever he reached for his violin.
And when, in the end, their advice had sunk in,
He finally put his fiddle to bed
And took up the theremin instead.
THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.
No. 512.—A Perpetual-Motion Machine.
MY MOTHER WAS not pleased by the electric bill that arrived a few weeks after Ned and I had built our Simple Supercollider (No. 503), and she positively prohibited me from undertaking any more constructions that used up our electricity. Although I strongly disagreed with her reasoning (believing that a thorough education in the physical sciences was well worth the few hundred thousand dollars it might cost in electricity), I was of course an obedient child, and I would never willingly disobey my mother. I therefore turned my attention to finding some means of obtaining electric power that did not involve the Duquesne Light company.
My first thought was naturally of batteries. Ned and I had already discovered how to make a battery from an onion, some beef broth, and a cup of grated Gruyere cheese. No, come to think of it, that was soup, not a battery. But the fundamental principles were doubtless similar. Batteries, however, while they worked well for such small projects as flashlights, telegraphs, and cattle prods, provided far too little power for some of the more advanced projects that Ned and I had already contemplated. For those, we needed a far more powerful source of electricity. In short, we needed a generator.
Building a generator was no great feat. My mother had a large collection of refrigerator magnets, and it was a simple matter to lump them together and spin coils of wire around them to produce an electrical current. But the spinning required a great deal of attention. It was necessary to keep the coils rotating constantly, which was very hard work. Even when Ned and I took turns, it cost us more effort than we were capable of to power our supercollider. It was obvious that we needed some form of motive power to keep our generator spinning.
But what could we use? We thought of hydroelectric power, but I pointed out that my mother was not likely to be any more reasonable about the water bill than she had been about the electrical bill. Wind power proved impractical: both Ned and I were out of breath and nearly turning blue before we could generate enough power just to get the supercollider warmed up.
We experimented with a clockwork mechanism removed from an old Edison phonograph. This gave us good results at first, but we found that the winding was nearly as tiring as spinning the generator directly had been. Steam power worked well until the kettle boiled dry and began to melt on the stove. It seemed as though every form of motive power had unfortunate limitations. What we needed was some sort of machine that, once started, would continue to spin with no further input of energy: in short, a perpetual-motion machine.
Ned warned me that such a device would violate the laws of physics; but I regarded the laws of physics as fundamentally unenforceable, a view I was prepared to argue before the highest court in the land if necessary. We experimented with a number of different configurations involving segmented disks with balls in the segments, but they all disappointed us. An arrangement of hammers on the edge of a wheel got a bit out of hand when we spun it too fast, with results best left undescribed.
Finally, we hit on the idea of powering our generator with an electric motor. Although my mother had prohibited me from tapping into our electricity for any such purpose, our neighbor, old Mrs. Smythe, had an electrical outlet on her back porch that was easy to reach with a 50-foot extension cord. We attached our generator to the electric motor, plugged in the cord, and were pleased to see that the thing worked the very first time. Unlike the clockwork motor, the steam-powered wheel, or the various mechanical contrivances we had tried, our electric motor continued to turn without any input of energy from us, and indeed continued to do so as long as Mrs. Smythe continued to pay her electric bill. We had succeeded in creating perpetual motion, and our electrical generator served us well in many later projects, about some of which you will read later on in this very book.