"Anything you say," yawned her companion, switching his tail negligently, "but I shall always call YOU, Handy Mandy. It suits you, m'lass, and you need no longer consider yourself a slave."
"Ho, ho, I never did," roared the Goat Girl, glancing cheerfully down at her lordly companion. "That was just a joke, wasn't it? You know, everything in this Land of Oz is extremely funny and peculiar. Two-armed natives, animals talking, Kings disappearing and mysterious messages and prophecies."
"People always think a new country strange!" observed the Ox philosophically. "To us it seems quite right and natural. But I daresay if I were to find myself on Mt. Mern I'd consider everything there very odd and upsetting; rocks flying through the air, for instance, and landing one soft and light as a daisy in a strange King's garden."
"But all of our rocks don't fly, in fact I never knew one to do such a thing before. And no wonder I landed as soft as a daisy—there was a blue daisy under me or I'd have been splintered to smithereens!"
"Daisy?" Nox licked his lips hungrily. "You never said anything about a daisy."
"Oh, I never tell all I know," confided Handy, "especially to Hi-qui-cockadoodlums like the King and his Counselors. But there was a daisy—growing on the rock and I picked it. As I started to fall I began pulling off the petals, and when I landed I came down on a high, huge pile of them, a heap as high as a haystack," continued Handy Mandy dreamily. "So I slid off the stack and turned to look at the castle, and when I looked again, the petals were gone, but there was the daisy itself growing up as pert as you please in this strange garden. So what did I do but pick it again and here it is!" Triumphantly Handy pulled the blue flower from her pocket.
"My, what a dear little daisy!" murmured the Ox. "How delicious it would taste."
"No! NO!" cried Handy, as Nox rolled his long tongue out toward the flower. "It's too pretty to eat."
"Nothing's too pretty to eat," replied the Ox plaintively. "Funny it hasn't wilted, though."