How Pinocchio Discovered That He Had a Heart and Had Become a Real Boy
He yawned, stuck out his tongue and licked the end of his nose, opened his eyes, shut them again, opened them once more and rubbed them vigorously with the back of his hand, jumped up, and then sat down on the sofa, listening intently for several minutes, after which he scratched his noddle solemnly. When Pinocchio scratched his head in this way you could be sure that there was trouble in the air. And so there was. The room was empty, the windows closed, and the door as well; no noise came from the still quiet street; a deep silence filled the air, yet there, right there, close to him, he heard queer sounds like blows—tick-tock ... tick-tock ... tick-tock ... tick-tock.
It sounded like some one who was amusing himself by rapping with his knuckles on a wooden box—tick-tock ... tick-tock ... tick-tock.
"But who is it?" called out the puppet, suddenly, jumping down from the sofa and running to peer into every corner of the room. When he had knocked over the chest, rummaged the wardrobe with the mirror, upset the little table, turned over the chairs, pulled the pictures off the walls, and torn down the window-curtains, he found himself seated on the floor in the middle of the room, dead tired, his face all smeared with dust and spider-webs, his shirt in tatters, his tongue hanging out like a pointer's returning from the hunt. Yet there, close to him, he still heard that strange tick-tock ... tick-tock ... tick-tock ... and it seemed as if those mysterious fingers were rapping even more quickly upon the mysterious wooden box. Pinocchio would have pulled his hair out in desperation if Papa Geppetto hadn't forgotten to make him any. But as the desperation of puppets lasts just about as long as the joy of poor human beings, Pinocchio, laying his right forefinger on the point of his magnificent nose, calmly remarked:
"Let me argue this out. There is no one else in here but me. I am keeping perfectly quiet, not even drawing a long breath, yet the noise keeps up.... Then, since it is not I who am making the noise, some one else must be making it, and as no one outside me is making it, whatever makes it must be inside me."
This seemed reasonable, but Pinocchio, who had not expected he would come to such a conclusion, gave a start, kicked violently, and began to roll around on the ground, yelling as if he would split his throat: "Help! Help!" The thought had suddenly come to him that during the night a mouse had jumped into his mouth and down into his stomach and was searching about in it for some way to get out. But the quieter he kept the noisier grew the tick-tock; in fact, so loud that it seemed to cut off his breath. Fear made him calm.
"Let me argue this out," he said again, laying his forefinger against his nose. "It cannot be a mouse; the movement is too regular, so regular that if I weren't sure that I went to bed without supper I should think I had swallowed Papa Geppetto's watch by mistake.... Hm! If he hadn't told me time and time again that I am only a little puppet without a heart I should almost believe that I had one down inside me, and that this tick-tock were indeed ..."
"Just so!"