"HE'S THE WORST BABY YOU EVER SAW"
"My great-great-great-great-great-granduncle, the perpetual baby," said Hans, wiping his eyes. "He's the worst baby you ever saw. He yells and howls and howls and yells all the time, and if he is left alone or put down for a moment he has a convulsion of rage that is terrible to witness. He breaks his toys the minute he gets them, and for fifteen years he has made a slave of my poor father, who has not let the child out of his lap in all that time."
"Fifteen years?" cried Frau Ehrenbreitstein. "What do you mean? How old is this baby?"
"Three hundred and forty-seven years, six months, and eight days," said Hans, ruefully, consulting a pocket calendar he had with him. "During my time with you," he added, "I have supported them. Father is alone in the house with the infant; we could not afford a servant, and the child yells so all the time that my father cannot get employment anywhere. It was this that drove me out into the world to earn a living for them. When I got only my food and bed, I shared my food with them, sending off a third of it every week. Then when money came along, I gave them a third of that; but the baby is as bad as ever, and father has written to say that he can stand it no more, and I must return home or he will send the baby to me here."
"But, mercy me!" roared the Mayor, who had come in and heard the story, "why doesn't the child grow?"
"He can't," sobbed Hans. "His mother once made a wish that he might always remain a baby, and it happened that she made the wish at the one instant of the year when all wishes are granted by the fairies."
"Nonsense," said the Mayor. "There are no fairies."
"Indeed, there are," said Hans. "There is my great-great-great-great-great-granduncle, the baby, to prove it. He's a little tyrant, and he has worn out every generation of the family since, making them look after him. It's terrible, and in trying to think what to do to relieve my poor father and still support myself I have neglected everything else, and that is why I—boo-hoo!—I wrote the wall-paper and matched a pink Emperor with a green and yellow comic poem."
"Poor lad!" said the Mayor's wife. "Poor lad! It is a cruel story."