"We don't mean their clothes," cried Maude. "We mean their general appearance."
"Ah! you are referring to the unnatural history aspect of the case. You mean their heads, of course. They do not fit properly. I have noticed it myself. It comes of expecting too much, and overdoing it; it is all the result of what so many people are fond of doing—putting old heads on young shoulders."
So the mystery was out. The old heads were unmistakably on young shoulders. And how very absurd the children looked! Not a bit like happy girls and boys, as they would have been had they possessed their own heads instead of over-grown and over-developed minds and brains. Old heads never do look well on young shoulders, and it is very foolish of people to think they do. It makes them children of a larger growth before their time, and is just as bad as having young heads on old shoulders. The moral of which is, that you should never be older than you are nor younger than you are not.
"But what are they doing with those bellows?" enquired Willie and Maude together.
"Raising the wind," promptly responded the Zankiwank, "or trying to. When folk grow old before their time you will generally find that it is owing to the bother they had in raising the wind to keep the pot boiling."
"But you don't keep the pot boiling with wind," they protested.
"Oh yes you do, in Topsy-Turvey Land, though personally I believe it to be most unright!"
"Un—what?" exclaimed Maude.
"Unright. When a thing is wrong it must be unright. Just the same as when a thing is right it is unwrong."
While the Zankiwank was giving this very lucid explanation the "Old heads on young shoulders" children went sedately and mournfully away, just as a complete train of newspaper carts dashed up to a large establishment with these words printed outside—