“I won’t do it,” he protested. “I’ll never do it!”
He struggled and twisted in his efforts to escape, but Nimbus held him fast, and Jack Frost kept him small by the clutch of his icy fingers.
Billy danced up and down in his excitement, for once the Equator almost got away.
“Go on down! Go on down!” shouted Billy. “My mother says you are only an imaginary line, anyway!”
“Why, Billy,” said his mother, “look at the way you have eaten up your poor North Pole!”
And at the sound of his mother’s voice Nimbus put a sunbeam into Billy’s mouth which tasted just like lemon candy. The clang of the enchanted trolley car sounded in his ears as the whole lot of his new friends stepped aboard and vanished from his sight. He looked around. But, instead of Nimbus and the Evening Star and Jack Frost and the Equator, he found his mother smiling down at him as he lay under the lilac bush, and the conductor was just ringing the bell for the trolley car to stop at the corner.
THE END
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