"And I'll warrant that in all the time you've had that opal glass jug on the mantel-piece of your library you never shook the ashes down in it once," said the Unwiseman.
"Mity-goo-dreeson-wy!" whistled Whistlebinkie. "They-ain't never no ashes in it."
"Correct though ungrammatically expressed," observed the Unwiseman. "There never are any ashes in it to be shaken down, which is a pretty good reason to believe that it is never used to fry potatoes on or to cook a chop with, or to roast a turkey in—which proves exactly what I say that it is only pretty and isn't half as useful as my kitchen-stove."
"It would be pretty hard to find anything useful for the bric-a-brac to do though," suggested Mollie, who loved pretty things whether they had any other use or not.
"It all depends on your bric-a-brac," said the Unwiseman. "I can find plenty of useful things for mine to do. There's my coal scuttle for instance—it works all the time."
"Coal-scuttles ain't bric-a-brac," said Whistlebinkie.
"My coal scuttle is," said the Unwiseman. "It's got a picture of a daisy painted on one side of it, and I gilded the handle myself. Then there's my watering pot. That's just as bric-a-bracky as any Chinese china pot that ever lived, but it's useful. I use it to water the flowers in summer, and to sift my lump sugar through in winter. Every pound of lump sugar you buy has some fine sugar with it and if you shake the lump sugar up in a watering pot and let the fine sugar sift through the nozzle you get two kinds of sugar for the price of one. So it goes all through my house from my piano to my old beaver hat—every bit of my bric-a-brac is useful."
"Wattonearth do-you-do with a-nold beevor-at?" whistled Whistlebinkie.
"I use it as a post-office box to mail cross letters in," said the Unwiseman gravely. "It's saved me lots of trouble."
"Cross letters?" asked Mollie. "You never write cross letters to anybody do you?"