"Excuse me," said the Dude Brownie anxiously, "but before I answer, must I answer in poetry or in prose? I'll do whichever you wish me to, but I'm a little tired this afternoon, and poetry is such an effort!"
"I'm very fond of poetry," said Jimmieboy, "especially your kind, but if you are tired and would rather speak the other way, you can."
The Dude Brownie smiled gratefully.
"You're a very kind little man," he said. "This time I'll talk the other way, but some day when I get it written I'll send you my book of poetry to make up for it. You like our animals, do you?"
"Very much," said Jimmieboy. "I'd like to see a Brownie zoo some time."
"I'll attend to that," said the Dude Brownie. "I'll make a note of it on the wall so that we won't forget it."
Here he seized a huge pencil, almost as big as himself, and wrote something on the wall which Jimmieboy could not read, but which he supposed was the Brownie's memorandum.
"Won't you spoil your wall doing that?" queried the little visitor.
"Oh no," said the Brownie. "All these walls are made of slate and we use 'em to write on. It saves littering the house all up with paper, and every Tuesday we have a house-cleaning bee and rub all the writing off. It's a very good scheme and I wonder your grown-up people don't have it, particularly in your nurseries. I've noticed children writing things on nursery walls lots of times and then they've been scolded for doing it because their nurses said it spoiled the paper. I can't understand why they don't have slate walls instead that can't be spoiled. It's such a temptation to write on a wall, but it does spoil paper. But to come back to our animals, they're really lovely, and have such wonderfully sweet dispositions. There is the Brownie Elephant, for instance—he's the most light hearted creature you ever saw, and he has holes bored through his trunk like a flute and at night he plays the most beautiful music on it, while we Brownies sit around and listen to him."
"What does he wear so many pairs of spectacles for?" asked Jimmieboy.