Jimmieboy raised the book to his ear and listened, and sure enough, there came a most extraordinary noise out of the windows of the house. It sounded like a carpenter at work with a saw in a menagerie full of roaring lions.
"Well, that is funny," said Jimmieboy as he listened. "I never knew before that Brownies ever got tired. I thought they simply played and played and played all the time."
The Dude Brownie laughed.
"Now there, my boy, is where you make
A really elegant mistake,"
he said, and then he added,
"If you will open wide the book
We'll let you come inside and look.
No other boy has e'er done that.
Come in and never mind your hat."
"I wouldn't wear my hat in the house anyhow," said Jimmieboy. "But I say, Mr. Brownie, I don't see how I can get in there. I'm too big."
"Your statement makes me fancy that
You really don't know where you're at;
For, though you're big and tall and wide,
Already, sir, you've come inside,"
replied the Dude Brownie, and Jimmieboy, rubbing his eyes as if he couldn't believe it, looked about him and discovered that even as the Dude Brownie had said, he had without knowing it already accepted the invitation and stood in the hall of the Brownie mansion. And O! such a mansion! It was just such a house as you would expect Brownies to have. There were no stairs in it, though it was three stories high. On the walls were all sorts of funny pictures, pictures of the most remarkable animals in the world or out of it, in fact most of the pictures were of animals that Jimmieboy had never heard of before, or even imagined. There was the Brownie Elephant, for instance, the cunningest little animal you ever saw, with forty pairs of spectacles running all the way down its trunk; and a Brownie Pug-dog with its tail curled so tightly that it lifted the little creature's hind legs off the floor; and most interesting of all, a Brownie Bear that could take its fur off in hot weather and put on a light flannel robe instead. Jimmieboy gazed with eyes and mouth wide open at these pictures.
"What queer animals," he said. "Do you really have such animals as those?"