Half-Hours with Jimmieboy

by John Kendrick Bangs

"Tell a story about a Giant," insisted Jimmieboy, a suggestion of tears in his voice.

"Oh, well," returned the sleepy father, sitting up and, rubbing his eyes vigorously in a vain effort to get all the sleepiness out of them. "If you must have it, you must have it, so here goes. Let's see—a story of a Giant or of a Dwarf?"

"Both," said Jimmieboy, placidly.

"Dear me!" cried his father. "I wish I'd kept quiet about the Dwarf. Well, once upon a time there was a Giant."

"And a Dwarf, too," put in Jimmieboy, who did not intend to be cheated out of a half of the story.

"Yes. And a Dwarf, too," said the other with a nod. "The Giant was a Dude Giant, who cared more for his hats than he did for anything else in the world. It was quite natural, too, that he should, for he had a finer chance to show them off than most people have, because he had no less than four heads, which is very remarkable for a Dude Giant, because dudes who are not giants very rarely have even one head worth mentioning. Hats were about the only things the Dude Giant cared for at all. He used to buy every style of head-gear he could find, and it took almost all of the salary he received at the Museum where he was on exhibition to pay for them; but he was particularly fond of silk hats. Of these he had twenty-eight; four for each day of the week, those for Sunday being especially handsome and costly.

"Now it happened that in the same exhibition with the Dude Giant there was a Dwarf named Tiny W. Littlejohn—W standing for Wee, which was his middle name. He was a very good-natured fellow, Tiny was, and as far as he knew he hadn't an enemy in the world. He was so very nice that everybody who came to the exhibition brought him cream cakes, and picture books, and roller skates, and other beautiful things, and nobody ever thought of going away without buying his photograph, paying him twenty-five cents extra for the ones with his autograph on, which his mother wrote for him. In this way the Dwarf soon grew to be a millionaire, while the Dude Giant squandered all he had on riotous hats, and so remained as poor as when he started. For a long time everything went smoothly at the Exhibition. There were no jealousies or quarrels of any sort, except between the Glass Eater and the man who made Glass Steamboats, and that was smoothed over in a very short time by the Glass Eater saying that the Glass-blower made the finest crystal pies he had ever tasted. But contentment and peace could not last forever in an establishment where one attraction was growing richer and richer every day as the Dwarf was, while another, the Dude Giant, was no better off than the day he joined the show, and when finally the Dwarf began to come every morning in a cab of his own, drawn by a magnificent gray horse with a banged tail, and to dress better even than the proprietor of the Museum himself, the Dude Giant became very envious, and when the Dude Giant gets envious he is a very disagreeable person. For instance, when no one was looking he would make horrible faces at Tiny, contorting his four mouths and noses and eight cheeks all at once in a very terrifying manner, and when he'd look cross-eyed at the Dwarf with all eight of his eyes poor Tiny would get so nervous that he would try to eat the roller skates and picture books, instead of the cream cakes people brought him, and on one occasion he broke two of his prettiest teeth doing it, which marred his personal appearance very much.

"Tiny stood it as long as he could, and then he complained to his friend, the Whirlwind, about it, and the Whirlwind, who was a very sensible sort of a fellow, advised him not to mind it. It was only jealousy, he said, that led the Dude Giant to behave that way, and if Tiny had not been more successful than Forepate—as the Dude Giant was called—Forepate wouldn't have been jealous, so that his very jealousy was an acknowledgment of inferiority. So Tiny made up his mind he wouldn't pay any attention to the Dude Giant at all, but would go right ahead minding his own business and making all the money he could.

"This made Forepate all the more angry, and finally he resolved to get even with the Dwarf in some other way than by making grimaces at him. Now, it happened that Forepate's place was over by a window directly opposite to where the Dwarf sat, and so, to get near enough to Tiny to put his scheme against him into execution, he complained to the manager that there was a terrible draft from the window, and added that unless he could sit on the other side of the room he was certain he'd catch cold in three of his heads anyhow, if not in all of them.

"'Very well,' said the manager. 'Where do you wish to sit?'