“I’m not real sure but that I want to turn back and—” but as he came to this conclusion he turned a corner in the labyrinth and emerged into a dazzle of light which blinded him for a minute after the Stygian darkness of the entrance way.
Halting to get his bearings and to take a general survey of the room, Billy found a wonderful fairyland spread out before him.
Myriads upon myriads of electric lights flooded the hall, revealing wonder upon wonder, for everywhere were the queerest people. Some were giants, others were pigmies. Part were exceedingly tall, with necks stretching out like the giraffe’s at the zoo, lank arms and dangling hands, faces narrow, chins pointed and noses long enough to pry into the business of the whole world. Some, on the other hand, were only two feet tall, but, strange to relate, they were as fat as the tall persons were lean—as fat as the man in the song:
“He’s six feet one way, two feet tudder,
An’ his coat won’t go half way round.”
“Pudgy, I call ’em,” decided Billy with a wag of the head, turning around to take a complete inventory of the room and its occupants. He brought up with a jerk, however, when he discovered his German woman immediately behind him, in excited conversation with another creature exactly like her.
Violently she gesticulated with her large, green-covered umbrella, and just as violently did her counterpart wave her rain-stick and nod her head.
“Vot you look like me for, eh?” the angry woman inquired. “Ain’t you any sense got? I vent hill up und hill down to get here and you come fun to make mid me. Eferyboty they just laugh und laugh at me all dis day, und I von’t haf it any more yet. You are Sherman, too, so then for why do you laugh?”
“There’s just one time that I wish I had been made a boy instead of a goat. Ordinarily, goats have much better times than boys, but when I laugh so hard my fat sides ache, I wish for a pair of hands that I might hold them the way the Treat boys do when they’re mightily tickled. I’m sure I could laugh both harder and longer and enjoy it much more with such a convenience as hands about me,” thought Billy, as he watched this by-play, a broad grin spreading over his face.
With a final threatening look, the woman turned and made off, but only to confront another equally German looking person a few feet farther on, who bore a striking resemblance to her.