The rambillicus book; wonder tales for children from 7 to 70

Contents

CHAPTER p AGE

I. The Benevolent Rambillicus 7

II. The Other Side ; . . 13

Chapter I THE BENEVOLENT RAMBILLICUS

ITTLE Johnnie Nelson, attired in a suit which, if it outlasts the wear of years, will fit him at the age of twelve, stood gazing across the river into the misty, many-tinted depths of the woodlands, already turning red and brown under the first subtle touch of advancing autumn. Over the river is always the land of the unknown, and to Johnnie, its calm, cool shades seemed to invite coaxingly, yet he held aloof. I inquired into the cause of his aloofness, or aloofishness, whichever it is, and he told me that the children had informed him there were Things over there that caught little boys.

Now, it is a shame to terrify timid boys like Johnnie,

IO although, thank heaven ! such boys are rare, so I took him aside and unfolded to him a great mystery.

I introduced him to the Benevolent Rambillicus, describing this beautiful basket-coated animal with great minuteness, and drew a faithful likeness of him, so that if Johnnie met one in the woods he would recognize it at once and not be terrified.

“The Rambillicus,” I said, “is a creature who devotes his entire life to tramping around the woods in search of good children who mind their parents, go to bed early, never cry or call each other names, and are kind to dumb animals and artists. He has a sweet, open countenance and a merry twinkle in his eye, and is the source of more delights than any other animal of which I know. He is something like a hippopotamus in shape, but has a hide ornamented with a basketwork pattern. He is hollow inside and simply loaded with good things, his cargo varying with the season, of course.

“ In summer, ice cream, cakes, pies, pretzels, fruit, soda water, lemonade, pickles, doughnuts, and other dainties ; in winter, candies of every sort, hot waffles, frankfurters, pork pies, and numberless other charming edibles constitute his internal make-up, and his whole delight is to give up these things to nice children with clean faces.

The Benevolent Rambillicus n

“ All you have to do is to find the Rambillicus, walk up to him quite fearlessly, and as he smiles and shows his works, just take a cake, a doughnut, a pickle, or anything you want, and say ‘Thank you,’ to him. He trembles with sheer delight when a good girl or boy says ‘ Thank you,’ and if you make a nice long speech of gratitude, he is so tickled that he just wriggles with glee and squirts soda water, cider, lemonade, and so on, out from every side ; so if you decide, my dear, to make such a speech, I advise you to stand in front of him.

“ A more lovable animal does not exist, nor, I may say, a more useful one. What a pity he refuses to come to the city and stay with us all the time instead of tramping around in the woods, where, I am sure, there are not nearly so many good children. However, such are his queer tastes.

“Perhaps, however, he could not exist in the city. I am sure he could not find the food he eats in our streets, for it is rare even in the woods nowadays. His principal diet is the sugar-coated hornswaggle, a kind of snail that is a regular bon-bon on the outside. The Benevolent Banana-toed Rambillicus licks the sugar off the hornswaggle, but does not eat the animals themselves. Every day the horn-swaggle recoats himself with powdered sugar, but it is not known where he procures it. I suspect he gets honey from the flowers, and it crystallizes upon his back just as it will in a jar if you do not hurry up and eat it quickly.

“ The Rambillicus bakes all his own pies, doughnuts, and so on, by animal heat in a curious oven in the centrifugal portion of his perutinium or diaplasticum, you understand, and thus they are always fresh, and a banana toe comes out from a hole in his pretty feet as fast as you remove one. His tail is a pump for either cider or lemonade, as you may desire, and there are more ways of getting good things out of him than I could remember to tell about.

“ On the whole, the Rambillicus is simply a lovely acquaintance, and if you are lucky enough to meet one you will have cause to remember me all your life ; therefore — ”

I was lying on the grass as I told these wonders to Johnnie, and I turned over to see why he had not asked me any questions. He had disappeared. When I left, thirty-nine of the larger children were still engaged in seeking him, and the matron declared that she would hold me responsible for his disappearance. I knew very well that Johnny had probably met the delightful Rambillicus, and was his, body and soul.

The Other Side

Chapter II THE OTHER SIDE

OT twenty-four hours after writing the story of the Rambillicus I received the following letter: Dear Mr. McDougall:

I liked your picture of the Rambillicus very much, but I would like to know what is on the other side of him. Yours truly,

Dick Steel.

Now it is curious that Dick is the only one who has suspected that there might be something different on the obverse side of the Benevolent Rambillicus. I was not going even to hint that if you walked around him you would see something fully as strange as there is on this side of him, but I thought I would just keep it a secret to tell to a few nice boys and girls. It is so very unusual to find an animal who looks different when viewed from the other side that I did not think any one would imagine this i6 was the case with the tender-hearted Rambillicus ; but, you see, Dick seems to have been smart enough to divine it. The Rambillicus is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the remarkable animals I know. The other side of him is so entirely different from this side that if Dick should happen to come upon him suddenly from the other side he really would not know or even suspect for one minute that he saw the Rambillicus, but he would think it was another sort of animal. The great Professor Duflicker, of Hoppoffsky College, Gesundheit, Germany, when he first observed one feeding in a grove full of sugar-coated hornswaggles, thought it was a new species of animal, and he called it the Myasfutis Duflickus, and it was only when it turned round to go home that he saw it was our dear old friend Rambillicus.

Well, now, I will describe the other side of this lovely creature, so that you will know him when you see him.

First, you will see that his head is different and his body comes away out toward you, with several doors in it leading to v compartments or rooms inside of him. A spiral stairway runs up his nearest hind leg and goes up to the top of the toboggan slide, which shoots down to the ground or into a pond, just as you wish. A large balloon that is fastened to his tail holds quite a number of

The Other Side of the Benevolent Rambillicus

The Other Side children, and goes up every fifteen minutes into clouds upon which table-cloths are laid, and lovely dinners of chicken salad, ham sandwiches, pickles, and ice-cream are waiting for you all the day long. When you get hot you just go up in the balloon and cool off and eat. All over the Rambillicus hang all sorts of toys, hoops, base-ball bats, roller skates, dolls, trumpets, sling-shots, suckers, drums, magic lanterns, guns, cameras, bicycles, etc., so that really, if I showed you a picture of him with everything on, he would look exactly like a toy store that had been mussed up by a cyclone.

When you go up the steps into his inside you find more wonders. At one end of him is a Punch and Judy show that never ends, with a splendid organ that he works by simply breathing. At the other, up by his neck, is a stage, where trained animals — dogs, horses, rabbits, cats, pigs, monkeys, and, strange to say, fleas (for Rambillicus fleas are large, but very harmless) — are performing constantly, and doing stunts that have never been seen on any other stage, and without, mind you, a man standing around cracking a whip all the time. The animals perform all by themselves, and are fine. Overhead a wonderful music box plays, and there is a broad, level floor for dancing or roller skating right in the middle. All sorts of lovely dresses and suits of clothes are in the closets all around, so that if you get your clothes mussed or soiled, you walk up and put on a new suit, and if you want to go dirty — well, all right, nobody cares. You do not even have to wash your face if you don’t want to, but, of course, the children here always do ; and there are lovely bath rooms under the dancing floor for them, with shower baths and even hose to squirt on each other. The other side of the Benevolent Rambillicus is always turned toward beautiful flower and fruit gardens, base-ball grounds, swimming ponds, hammocks and swings, and places where boys and girls can shout, squeal, and make the most uncouth noises without anybody’s objecting in the least. And finally, if you wish to stay, there are beds to sleep in, and you need not go to bed until you feel good and sleepy.

But yet, delightful as it all is, I would not like, if I were a child, to remain long with good old Rambillicus, because, while you are there, so much is going on to distract the attention that one cannot learn his lessons, and perhaps forgets even what he has learned, and so falls behind his class at school.

Besides that, this animal has a queer habit of chewing up all the school books he comes across, and you know what happens when you lose your school books.

Over the Housetop

Chapter III

AM going to tell you now about a boy who never had heard of the Rambillicus nor of any of the animals in the woods ; in fact, he did not even know that there was a woods, nor any other place outside of his own neighborhood.

This boy’s name is Mose Lubinsky, and he lived in a narrow alley in a part of the city which is very dirty and nasty all the time. All the streets are crowded with people trying to sell each other all sorts of rubbish ; the sidewalks are blocked with barrels and boxes of stale vegetables and half-decayed fruit, and the very meanest and mangiest dogs run about, half starved, with all the natural abandon of mongrels. Even the air seems soiled and musty in this locality. The houses are all very old and look as if they never had seen a house cleaning since William Penn died. The gutters are filled with scraps of paper, cabbage-leaves, banana-peel, fishheads, and all sorts of trash, and the children have to play there because the sidewalks are taken up by the stands and the people buying, selling, or gossiping. The house in which Mose lived was back of another house, and there was only a narrow court for the children to play in. There were sixty-nine children to play in this one court, so you may see that a little chap like Mose did not get much chance.

Anyhow, he would have had no time to play, for he had to take care of his baby half-sister all the time. That is why he never went to school. Just as soon as one baby got big enough to walk, there came another and he was kept very busy constantly. His own mother had died when he was very young and his father had married again, and his stepmother did not love him a bit. She never got him any new clothes, but bought old, secondhand things from the stands, and they were always too big for Mose, so that he looked like a shapeless bundle of rags. His stepmother would not mend his clothes when the larger boys tore them, but just tied strings around him and these kept breaking, so that his clothes fell off whenever he got a chance to put the baby down and play for a minute.

The other children did not like Mose much, either, for he had a habit of keeping his face clean, so that he seemed different from the rest of the boys in the street. His stepmother, too, often wondered where he got this habit, for it was certainly not from her, as she washed her face only once in a while, when it began to feel kind of crinkly from the dirt. One day his fathei died, and after a little time his stepmother married a huckster, and then Mose had a stepfather. Was there ever a boy worse off in the world? His stepfather used to amuse himself by beating Mose, and then, when he got out of the house, the other boys would pounce upon him and lam him because he would not cry when his father beat him, so that they could enjoy it too. He had to sleep in a box full of old rags, and all the pleasure he got in life was in the company of a starved little dog, who actually had no name (think of it !) because Mose did not know enough to choose a name for him. He just called him Dog.

Dog was the only one who was fond of Mose, and Mose’s whole heart went out to him in return. He would talk to him in bed at night, and tell him that some day they would run away, as soon as he could raise ten cents, and go to another part of town ; for, of course, Mose did not know anything about running away to sea and becoming a sailor, an admiral, or a pirate, or going to fight Indians, as most boys do when they run away from home. When Mose said this, Dog would look at him with his big brown eyes and wag his tail, seeming to understand every word. He would run to the door and almost say: “Let’s go right now, and I’ll show you the way.”

Well, one night the room in which the whole family of nine slept was so warm and smelt so strong of garlic, and Mose was so hungry, that he could not sleep, so he went out on the roof at the back of the house with Dog and sat there, wishing he had one of the big, brown cakes that the old man at the corner sells, two for a cent. The air was pretty cold, and Mose shivered as he pulled his rags closely together around him. Dog shook, too, a good deal, but as he did that most of the time, or whenever he passed a boy or another dog, Mose did not think he was as cold as himself. The sky was very clear, and Mose looked up at the stars and wondered if a man came around and fixed them every night, as he did the electric lights at the corner.

They twinkled down merrily at him, making him feel as if they were eyes shining up there, and he wished he could sail away and up into the sky, far, far from babies and stepfathers and mothers, and stay forever, just floating along like smoke. You see he was so empty and starved that he felt just like you feel when you have a fever. He was so empty that he felt as though he could easily float off the roof if the wind should blow hard, and he wondered if he would look as skinny as Dog if he took his clothes off. It had been a long time since he had taken off his clothes, for they were so tied up that it would have been pretty hard to get them on again, and therefore he had to sleep in them. By and by, as he watched the stars, he saw that one of them was moving along and passing the rest of them quite swiftly. This surprised Mose, as he had often sat there and looked at them, but none of them had ever moved. It surely was going along, however, and he went to the edge of the roof to see more clearly.

Pretty soon he saw a big, dark thing like a round cloud coming along, and then he saw that what he had thought was a star was a light on this big, dark spot. It came nearer, and when it was right overhead a strange thing happened. Something just grabbed Mose right at the waistband of his trousers and snatched him up into the air. As he was lifted off the roof Dog grabbed him by the leg of his trousers and went along too.

Now, I know you will think the Geewhiz, the Snollygaster, the Hyossimus, or some such animal had got Mose, but you will be mistaken ; for, after all, Mose was a good boy, even if you may say he had no time to be bad had he wanted to. No, this was what had happened. The dark thing was a balloon going over the city, and the man in the balloon had dropped the anchor in order to stop the balloon so that he could go to a drug store and get some quinine pills, but the anchor had just skipped along over the housetops, missing everything except Mose and Dog. It yanked them up into the air and swept them along like the wind, higher and higher.

He could not yell, but only held on to Dog with all his might, hoping that his waistband would not give out and drop him on top of some sharp steeple. He could see all the big city as it spread out beneath him and he wondered how far it went, for there seemed to be nothing but lights as far as he could see, and you may be sure he could see several miles from that height. His waistband held all right, for neither Mose nor Dog was very heavy. Soon they had passed over the city and could see the dark forests beneath them, but Mose did not know what forests they were, of course. They came lower and lower, after a while, and soon were sailing along, just brushing the tops of the tall trees of the woods ; then, while Mose was wondering if that was a public park, such as he had seen in the city, whack ! they went against a big pine tree, and then the ragged old trousers gave way !

The Journey Over the Housetops

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*

Down fell Mose, holding fast to Dog, through the bending branches, from limb to limb, until they both landed on a deep bed of green moss at the foot of the tree.

When Mose picked himself up he was not hurt at all, nor was Dog, but Mose’s rags were somewhere up in the tree and he had no more clothes on than Dog had. But he was so glad to get away from the thing that had caught him — for he did not know it was a balloon — that he did not care about losing his ragged clothes, and they were so tired with slapping about in the air that they both lay down on the moss and went right to sleep.

Now the Benevolent Rambillicus lived in these woods, but he had had so many youngsters coming to see him that he was nearly wild at being so busy, and he had engaged an animal called the Skeewink to help him out. The Skeewink, who is a fat, merry old fellow, that looks more like a big coon than anything else, was wandering around just at sunrise, looking for Gazipp berries, and he came upon Mose and Dog lying asleep under the pine tree. He was quite surprised to see a boy without any clothes in the woods, so he hurried away to Rambillicus and woke him up.

“ Hey, Ram,” said he, in some excitement, “come over here, quick ! I’ve just found a Cupid, I think, over by the lemonade brook ! Anyway, if it isn’t a Cupid, (and, in fact, if it is, he’ s a very dirty Cupid) it’s a boy you ought to attend to, for he has a nice face, but looks awfully starved.”

“All right,” said Rambillicus ; “ I’ll go over just as soon as I have ordered breakfast for all the children.” The Skeewink said that the Cupid had no clothes and Rambillicus told him to pick out a nice suit of navy blue, with a captain’s gold stripes on the sleeves, and take it to the boy ; but when the Skeewink got back with the clothes, Mose and Dog were paddling around in a little lake and having great fun, for, strange to say, it was just like summer where the Rambillicus lived. It was the first time Mose had ever bathed, and when the Skeewink came to the shore of the pond and called him he did not want to come out ; besides, he was a little afraid of the animal and so was Dog, but Dog was always scared, anyway. Still, the Skeewink looked pleasant, so they came out, and when Mose saw the clothes he fell into the lake again from surprise.

The captain’s suit looked so grand that Mose was afraid to put it on, and really the Skeewink had to help him, for he had never had a new suit and did not know just how to get into it. Then, after the Skeewink had shown them the lemonade brook and they

The Skeewink Discovers Mose

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had taken a big drink of the very finest lemonade in all the world, he took them to Rambillicus. Well, poor Mose’s head simply swam around when he saw the things that Rambillicus had for children. The other youngsters there took Mose all about after breakfast and showed him how to get the red bananas, cakes, pretzels, pickles, and everything, and how to play games of all kinds ; and Dog ran around with his tail up in the air for the first time in his life. He himself was surprised at that even more than Mose was. The day passed in one endless string of delights, and Mose would pinch himself and Dog every little while to see if he were not dreaming. At night they all slept in pretty little tents on the sweetest scented beds, where Mose lay for a long while with Dog cuddled up beside him, afraid to go to sleep for fear of waking up at home in the box of dirty rags.

The next day it was just the same, and some of the games were of such a kind that, somehow or other, Mose began to learn his letters without really knowing it, and his enjoyment was so great that he almost cried at the thought of another thing grabbing him and carrying him off home, for that was what any boy who did not know much might well have imagined who had been picked up in the dark by a balloon. Perpetual summer sunshine, gay, sweetly-perfumed flowers, and continuous laughter were something new to Mose, and every moment was precious to him, for he could not believe that it would last ; but day after day went like the day before, and still it endured, and all the time he was learning all sorts of things that made another boy of him.

One day he suddenly noticed that Dog, who now was called Aaron, because he followed Moses, had grown awfully fat — so fat that it was all he could do to wag his tail — and that made Mose wonder if he, too, had got fat. He went to a mirror, and, lo ! he was so plump that he hardly knew himself, and, in fact, he now looked like quite another boy than the skinny Mose who had come there a few days before. He told Aaron that he was afraid that no balloon anchor could hold them now if it took them — for, you see, he now knew what it was that had brought them there. He was employed all the time helping Rambillicus attend to the younger children and teaching them games, and he enjoyed that immensely, for nothing is more pleasing than to impart knowledge to those who know less than you do.

Well, time passed on — as it has a habit of doing, even in the woods — and one day Rambillicus came to Mose, as he was showing a flock of Gewgaw birds to a lot of newly-arrived children, and said :

“Mose, the time has now come for you to return home, as you are now too big to be wasting time here among the children.”

“Why!” cried poor Mose, “I’ve been here only a little while ! I don’t want to go home, for nobody loves me there and everybody does here.”

“You have now been here seven years,” said Rambillicus, “ and you can’t spend your whole life here. It would not be right. I want you out among the children, so that you can send them to me from the part of town you live in. You will be the Rambillicus’s agent there, you see.”

Mose was so surprised to hear that he had been there for seven years that he had nothing more to say, and when the Skeewink came with an immense load of toys to take with him to town he almost wept.

“Take these toys and start a store and sell them cheap to poor children,” said Rambillicus. “Your store will always be filled with all the newest things, so that all will go to you to buy, because you have been a good boy and deserve all you get.”

Up came a horse and a big wagon, and after he had said good-by to Rambillicus and the children Mose went away, but he promised to come every little while to see the dear old fellow. The Skeewink went to the edge of the woods with him, and then Mose departed. When Mose got back to town, following the directions given by Dog Aaron, who knew the way well, like all dogs do, he found everything changed.

The ramshackle old house in which he had lived had been pulled down and a big store stood there, with Moses Lubinsky over the door ; it had been bought for him by Rambillicus for his toy store.

When he inquired after his stepfather and stepmother he learned that he had beaten her and given her a black eye four years before, and had been sent to jail ; whereupon his stepmother had run away with a peddler. All of his half-brothers were in the orphan asylum, and nobody knew he was the little boy who had disappeared seven years before, but everybody wanted to know the rich toy dealer who was going to start the big store.

So there is Mose now, and if you want to see him yourself, go and look for his sign, away down Fourth Street, and when you find it, walk in and tell him that I sent you to him.

The Undoing of the Delicatessen

Chapter IV THE UNDOING OF THE DELICATESSEN

OW I am going to tell you how two boys discovered the Rambillicus, and how they overcame a dreadful animal called the Delicatessen, which had despoiled the Benevolent One of all the children’s fine toys and other good things.

Marmaduke Adair Hoover was one of these boys. He was a very sickly lad, whose legs were so weak that he could walk but a few steps at a time, and had to be pushed around in a wheel chair. He never played any of the games that all other boys enjoyed ; the best he could do was to sit and look on, and he was glad to be able to do that, as most days he was in bed. The other boy was named Shorty Fortesque, and everybody said he was a bad boy because he broke windows, robbed birds’ nests, smoked cigarettes, and fought with other boys upon each and every occasion that presented itself. Yet. bad as he was, he had a good heart and he was so sorry for Marmaduke that, instead of leaving him alone as the others did, he used to wheel him around for hours. In fact, all that Marmaduke ever had seen of the fields and woodlands was what he had observed when Shorty pushed the chair, for there was no one else willing to do it. In return Marmaduke, who had read many books, told great stories to Shorty, which the latter thought repaid him for the slight trouble of wheeling the sickly boy about.

One day, not long after the Fourth of July, as Shorty was lying in the grass beside Marmaduke in the shade of a great chestnut tree, far in the woods, and Marmaduke was thinking of getting out of his chair and taking a few steps, something rustled in the bushes near them.