“How should I know?” shrugged the Pixie. “He doesn’t know, himself, really. He stuck to Rumpelstiltskin a few hundred years, but lately he changes it every time. He has to, you know, because he always gives it away, himself, spinning ’round on one leg. That’s just how much sense he has.”
“Which side of the hill, I wonder,” went on Wendell, turning to the Beauteous Maiden, but to his startled surprise, she had vanished, and there sat the frog, as green, as goggle-eyed, as unintelligent, as altogether repulsive as if it had never won a beauty contest in its life.
CHAPTER VII
WENDELL WORKS THE MIDNIGHT SPELL
“Well, I suppose I’ve got to do it,” said the harassed boy. “How I’m ever going to stay awake till midnight, I don’t see.”
“Oh, I’ll wake you, my boy,” said the Pixie obligingly. “You go to bed.”
“And what am I going to do with him—with her?” pursued Wendell, pointing vindictively to the frog. “Now I know what she is, I’ve got to make her comfortable somewhere. She can’t sleep in a stocking.”
The frog blinked and stared at him. Wendell stared back gloomily. He wondered if different frogs looked different to each other, like boys and dogs. It seemed to him that this frog was particularly ugly, even judged by frog standards of beauty. Well, poor thing! that was probably the Kobold’s fault.
“I know what I’ll do with her,” he said. “I’ll put her in the guest chamber for the night. She’ll like that. Virginia’s away overnight.”
It wasn’t very easy to catch the frog. It eluded Wendell with long-legged leaps, but Wendell cornered it at last, with the help of the Pixie, and carried it, its little heart pulsating with fright, to the dainty room that Cousin Virginia occupied, and tucked it into bed.