"You're dead," said Tom, looking at him as he stood on his knee as white as a ghost.
"No, I ain't!" answered a little squeaking voice over his head. "This is me up here, in my ball dress; and that's my skin. Ha, ha! you could not do such a trick as that!"
And no more Tom could. For the little rogue had jumped clean out of his own skin, and left it standing on Tom's knee, eyes, wings, legs, tail, exactly as if it had been alive.
"Ha, ha!" he said, and he jerked and skipped up and down, never stopping an instant, just as if he had Saint Vitus's dance. "Ain't I a pretty fellow now?"
And so he was; for his body was white, and his tail orange, and his eyes all the colours of a peacock's tail. And what was the oddest of all, the whisks at the end of his tail had grown five times as long as they were before.
"Ah!" said he, "now I will see the gay world. My living won't cost me much, for I have no mouth, you see, and no inside; so I can never be hungry nor have the stomach ache neither."
No more he had. He had grown as dry and hard and empty as a quill, as such silly, shallow-hearted fellows deserve to grow.
But instead of being ashamed of his emptiness, he was quite proud of it, as a good many fine gentlemen are, and began flirting and flipping up and down, and singing:
"My wife shall dance, and I shall sing,
So merrily pass the day:
For I hold it for quite the wisest thing,
To drive dull care away."
And he danced up and down for three days and three nights, till he grew so tired that he tumbled into the water and floated down. But what became of him Tom never knew, and he himself never minded; for Tom heard him singing to the last, as he floated down: