CHAPTER IX.
THE SPRITE'S STORY.
WHEN I was not more than a thousand years old—" said the sprite.
"Excuse me," interrupted the major. "But what was the figure?"
"One thousand," returned the sprite. "That was nine thousand years ago—before this world was made. I celebrated my ten-thousand-and-sixteenth birthday last Friday—but that has nothing to do with my story. When I was not more than a thousand years of age, my parents, who occupied a small star about forty million miles from here, finding that my father could earn a better living if he were located nearer the moon, moved away from my birthplace and rented a good-sized, four-pronged star in the suburbs of the great orb of night. In the old star we were too far away from the markets for my father to sell the products of his farm for anything like what they cost him; freight charges were very heavy, and often the stage-coach that ran between Twinkleville and the moon would not stop at Twinkleville at all, and then all the stuff that we had raised that week would get stale, lose its fizz, and have to be thrown away."
"Let me beg your pardon again," put in the major. "But what did you raise on your farm? I never heard of farm products having fizz to lose."
"We raised soda-water chiefly," returned the sprite, amiably. "Soda-water and suspender buttons. The soda-water was cultivated and the suspender buttons seemed to grow wild. We never knew exactly how; though from what I have learned since about them, I think I begin to understand the science of it; and I wish now that I could find a way to return to Twinkleville, because I am certain it must be a perfect treasure-house of suspender buttons by this time. Even in my day they used to lie about by the million—metallic buttons every one of them. They must be worth to-day at least a dollar a thousand."
"What is your idea about the way they happened to come there, based on what you have learned since?" asked the major.
"Well, it is a very simple idea," returned the sprite. "You know when a suspender button comes off it always disappears. Of course it must go somewhere, but the question is, where? No one has ever yet been known to recover the suspender button he has once really lost; and my notion of it is simply that the minute a metal suspender button comes off the clothes of anybody in all the whole universe, it immediately flies up through the air and space to Twinkleville, which is nothing more than a huge magnet, and lies there until somebody picks it up and tries to sell it. I remember as a boy sweeping our back yard clear of them one evening, and waking the next morning to find the whole place covered with them again; but we never could make money on them, because the moon was our sole market, and only the best people of the moon ever used suspenders, and as these were unfortunately relatives of ours, we had to give them all the buttons they wanted for nothing, so that the button crops became rather an expense to us than otherwise. But with soda-water it was different. Everybody, it doesn't make any difference where he lives, likes soda-water, and it was an especially popular thing in the moon, where the plain water is always so full of fish that nobody can drink it. But as I said before, often the stage-coach wouldn't or couldn't stop, and we found ourselves getting poorer every day. Finally my father made up his mind to lease, and move into this new star, sink a half-dozen soda-water wells there, and by means of a patent he owned, which enabled him to give each well a separate and distinct flavor, drive everybody else out of the business."
"You don't happen to remember how that patent your father owned worked, do you?" asked the major, noticing that Jimmieboy seemed particularly interested when the sprite mentioned this. "If you do, I'd like to buy the plan of it from you and give it to Jimmieboy for a Christmas present, so that he can have soda-water wells in his own back yard at home."