"My pockets," gasped Pajuka, with a great groan. "What is a man without his pockets? No place to put his hands or his bills!" Clapping his wing to his side, Pajuka looked tragically at Snip, and Snip patting his own bulging pockets—pockets full of cake crumbs, marbles, pencil stubs and string—nodded sympathetically. "And not only that," continued the goose in a grieved voice, "I waken at such ridiculous hours. Hah, hoh! I find myself falling asleep." Pajuka paused here for a simply tremendous yawn. "Right after supper, Hoh hum!" finished the goose apologetically. Then, tucking his head under his wing and drawing up one leg, he fell fast asleep before Snip could ask him another question.
Pajuka was so close to the fire that the little button boy was afraid he would singe his feathers. So, picking him up carefully, he set him back against a gnarled old tree and, curling up on a pile of leaves beside him, lay watching old Mombi. The wind fortunately was blowing away from him, or he certainly would have been choked by the awful mixtures in the black frying pan. If he had not known positively that her magic powers were gone, he would have taken to his heels at once, for the monsters that Mombi was trying to conjure up out of the frying pan, would have devoured him in a minute.
"Magicum squadgicum squidgicum squdge
I order a snooch to come out of this smudge!"
Mombi frowned darkly as she hissed this, but only a dense smoke rose from the frying pan, and after listening nervously to ten separate incantations and finding that nothing at all happened, Snip curled down among the leaves and was soon as fast asleep as Pajuka—asleep and dreaming he, himself, was a goose being chased up a pink mountain by a giant with a blue ax.
Mombi continued her experiments with the frying pan long after Snip and Pajuka were asleep, but finally she gave up in disgust and then she, too, lay down for a nap, which lasted until dawn.
