Mr. Frog, however, was not dismayed. He leaped suddenly into the air and alighted directly in front of a Beaver known among his friends as Stingy Steve—the very one to whom Mr. Frog had just shown his sign.
"Pay up, please!" Ferdinand Frog said.
"How much do I owe you?" the uneasy Beaver asked him.
"Sixty!" Mr. Frog told him, with a grin.
Stingy Steve thrust his hand inside the pocket of his new trousers, from which he slowly drew one of Mr. Frog's tape-measures—of which the tailor had at least a dozen. Mr. Frog was always tucking them away in odd places.
"Here!" Stingy Steve cried. "Here's your pay—sixty inches, neither more nor less!"
But Ferdinand Frog only laughed and told him that he didn't mean inches. That, he explained, was no pay at all.
"I know," Stingy Steve replied. "I know it's not the fashionable way to pay a bill at present. But it will be five years from now. And what's more, you can't prove that what I say isn't true."
For a few moments Mr. Frog stood there gasping. And pretty soon he noticed that his customers were all busily picking up chips and sticks and pebbles. At first he thought they were going to throw them at him; and he was all ready to jump.
But he soon found that he was mistaken.