“A cabbit,” said Laurie, loftily, “is something between a cabbage and a carrot.”
“What does it look like?” giggled Polly.
Laurie blinked. “We-ell, you’ve seen a—you’ve seen an artichoke, haven’t you?” Polly nodded and Laurie blinked again. “And you’ve seen a—a mangel-wurzel?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then I don’t see how I can tell you,” said Laurie, evidently relieved, “because a cabbit is more like a mangel-wurzel than anything else. Of course, it’s not so deciduous, and the shape is different; it’s more obvate than a mangel-wurzel; more—” he swept his hands vaguely in air—“more phenomenal.”
“Oh, dry up,” said Ned, grinning. “How’d you like to have to put up with an idiot like that all your life, Polly? The worst of it is, folks sometimes mistake him for me!”
“Yes, it’s awful, but I manage to bear up under it,” Laurie sighed.
“How did you ever come to think of making those funny rhymes?” Polly asked.
“Oh, we had measles once, about four years ago,” said Ned. “We always had everything together—measles, whooping-cough, scarlet fever, everything. And when we were getting over it they wouldn’t let us read and so we made up rhymes. I forget whose idea it was. I’d make up one line and Laurie would make up the other, or the other way round. The idea was to have the last word of the first line so hard that the other fellow couldn’t rhyme to it. But I guess I only stuck Laurie once. Then the word was lemon.”
“You didn’t really stick me then,” Laurie denied. “I rhymed it with demon. You said they didn’t rhyme, but I showed you a rhyming dictionary that said they did.”