"Thank you, I am satisfied. I thought you had forgotten. I am not cross with you."
Maude and Willie vowed they would not cross him for anything, let alone nothing, and so the Zankiwank was appeased and offered to give them the correct answer to his own unanswerable conundrum. Do you know what a conundrum is though? I will tell you while the Zankiwank is curling his whiskers:—
A conundrum is an impossible question with an improbable answer. Think it over the next time you read "Robinson Crusoe."
"Nothing is better than a good little girl;
But a jam tart is better than nothing,
Therefore a jam tart is better than the best little girl alive."
"What do you think of that?" said the Zankiwank.
"I have heard something like it before. But that is nothing. Anyhow I would much rather be a little girl than a jam tart—because a jam tart must be sour because it's tart, and a little girl is always sweet," promptly replied Willie, kissing his sister Maude on the nose—but that was an accident, because she moved at the wrong moment.
"You distress me," said the Zankiwank. "Suppose I were to try to shoot Folly as it flies, and hit a Fool's Cap and Bells instead, what would you say?"
"I should say that you had shot at nothing and missed it."
At this Maude and Willie laughed girlsterously and boysterously, and the Zankiwank wept three silent tears in the teeth of the wind and declared that nothing took his fancy so much as having nothing to take. So they took him by the arm and begged him, as he was so clever and had mentioned the name, to take them to Fancy's dwelling-place.
"I think Fancy must dwell amongst the wild flowers—the sweet beautiful wild flowers that grow in such charming variety of disorder." Saying this, Maude took Willie's hand and urged the Zankiwank forward.