“They are wonderful children,” said Any Ice Today. “And will you tell me how they get back to the moon after they slide down the toboggan?”
“Oh, that is easy,” said Potato Face. “It is just as easy for them to slide up to the moon as to slide down. Sliding up and sliding down is the same for them. The big white spiders fixed it that way when they snizzled and sniffered and made the toboggan.”
How Gimme the Ax Found Out About
the Zigzag Railroad and Who Made
It Zigzag
One day Gimme the Ax said to himself, “Today I go to the postoffice and around, looking around. Maybe I will hear about something happening last night when I was sleeping. Maybe a policeman began laughing and fell in a cistern and came out with a wheelbarrow full of goldfish wearing new jewelry. How do I know? Maybe the man in the moon going down a cellar stairs to get a pitcher of butter-milk for the woman in the moon to drink and stop crying, maybe he fell down the stairs and broke the pitcher and laughed and picked up the broken pieces and said to himself, ‘One, two, three, four, accidents happen in the best regulated families.’ How do I know?”
So with his mind full of simple and refreshing thoughts, Gimme the Ax went out into the backyard garden and looked at the different necktie poppies growing early in the summer. Then he picked one of the necktie poppies to wear for a necktie scarf going downtown to the postoffice and around looking around.
“It is a good speculation to look nice around looking around in a necktie scarf,” said Gimme the Ax. “It is a necktie with a picture like whiteface pony spots on a green frog swimming in the moonshine.”
So he went downtown. For the first time he saw the Potato Face Blind Man playing an accordion on the corner next nearest the postoffice. He asked the Potato Face to tell him why the railroad tracks run zigzag in the Rootabaga Country.