“Yes, yes, a fable is just a story—nothing else. You can have in it anything you want to.”
“But it must rhyme!”
Walter was thinking about reciting his robber song, but fortunately he reconsidered the matter. That would have been scandalous in the home of the Hallemans, who were so particularly respectable.
“No,” cried another, who was again wiser than all the rest, “it needn’t rhyme. The cow gives milk—Jack saw the plums hanging—Prince William the First was a great thinker. Don’t you see, Walter, it’s as easy as rolling off of a log. Go ahead and tell something, or else you won’t get your pawn.”
Walter began.
“A little boy died once who was not allowed to go to heaven——”
“Oho! That’s the story of Peri. Tell something else.”
“I was going to change it,” said Walter, embarrassed. “And so the little boy couldn’t enter the heavenly gates, because he didn’t know French, and because he had sometimes been bad, and because he hadn’t learned his lessons, and also because he—because he”——I believe Walter had something on the end of his tongue about his mother’s box of savings, but he swallowed it, that he might not offend the Hallemans by any allusion to the peppermint business—“because he once laughed during prayers. For it is certain, boys, that if you laugh during prayers you’ll never get to heaven.”
“So—o-oo?” asked several, conscious of their guilt.
“Yes, they can’t go to heaven. Now the boy had had a sister, who died one year before him. He had loved her a lot, and when he died he began to hunt for his sister right away. ‘Who is your sister?’ he was asked.”