Mollie and the Unwiseman

"Ah!" said the Unwiseman, opening it and reading it. "I am sorry to say that I must leave you now. I have an engagement with my hatter this afternoon, and if I don't go now he will be much disappointed."

"Is that letter from him?" asked Mollie.

"Oh no," said the Unwiseman, putting on his coat. "It is from myself. I thought about the engagement last night, and fearing that I might forget it I wrote a short note to myself reminding me of it. This is the note. Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Mollie, and then, as the Unwiseman went off to meet his hatter, she and the others deemed it best to go home.

"But why did he say he expected you to call and then seemed surprised to see you?" asked the new doll.

"Oh – that's his way," said Mollie. "You'll get used to it in time."

But the new doll never did, for she was a proud wax-doll, and never learned to love the Unwiseman as I do for his sweet simplicity and never-ending good nature.

VIII

The Unwiseman Turns Poet

In which the Unwiseman Goes into Literature

The ground was white with snow when Mollie awakened from a night of pleasant dreams. The sun shone brightly, and as the little girl looked out of her bed-room window it seemed to her as if the world looked like a great wedding-cake, and she was very much inclined to go out of doors and cut a slice out of it and gobble it up, just as if it were a wedding-cake and not a world.

Whistlebinkie agreed with her that that was the thing to do, but there were music-lessons and a little reading to be done before Mollie could hope to venture out, and as for Whistlebinkie, he was afraid to go out alone for fear of getting his whistle clogged up with snow. Consequently it was not until after luncheon that the two inseparable companions, accompanied by Mollie's new dog, Gyp, managed to get out of doors.

"Isn't it fine!" cried Mollie, as the snow crunched musically under her feet.

"Tsplendid!" whistled Whistlebinkie.

Gyp took a roll in the snow and gleefully barked to show that he too thought it wasn't half bad.

"I wonder what the Unwiseman is doing this morning," said Mollie, after they had romped about for some little while.

"I dare say he is throwing snow-balls at himself," said Whistlebinkie. "That's about as absurd a thing as any one can do, and he can always be counted upon to be doing things that haven't much sense to 'em."

"I've half a mind to go and see what he's doing," said Mollie.

"Let's," ejaculated Whistlebinkie, and Gyp indicated that he was ready for the call by rushing pell-mell over the snow-encrusted lawn in the direction of the spot where the Unwiseman's house had last stood.

"Gyp hasn't learned that the Unwiseman moves his house about every day," said Mollie.

"Dogs haven't much sense," observed Whistlebinkie, with a superior air. "It takes them a long time to learn things, and they can't whistle."

"That they haven't," came a voice from behind Whistlebinkie. "That little beast has destroyed eight lines of my poem with his horrid paws."

Mollie turned about quickly and there was the house of the Unwiseman, and sitting on the door-step was no less a person than the old gentleman himself, gazing ruefully at some rough, irregular lines which he had traced in the snow with a stick, and which were punctuated here and there by what were unmistakably the paw-marks of Gyp.

"Why – hullo!" said Mollie; "moved your house over here, have you?"

"Yes," replied the Unwiseman. "There is so much snow on the ground that I was afraid it would prevent your coming to see me if I let the house stay where it was, and I wanted to see you very much."

"It was very thoughtful of you," said Mollie.

"Yes; but I can't help that, you know," said the Unwiseman. "I've got to be thoughtful in my new business. Thoughts and snow and a stick are things I can't get along without, seeing that I haven't a slate or pen, ink and paper, in the house."

"You've got a new business, then, have you?" said Mollie.

"Yes," the Unwiseman answered. "I had to have. When the Christmas toy business failed I cast about to find some other that would pay for my eclaires. My friend the hatter wanted me to go in with him, but when I found out what he wanted me to do I gave it up."

"What did he want you to do?" asked Mollie.

"Why, there is a restaurant next door to his place where two or three hundred men went to get their lunch every day," said the Unwiseman. "He wanted me to go in there and carelessly knock their hats off the pegs and step on them and spoil them, so that they'd have to call in at his shop and buy new ones. My salary was to be fifteen a week."

"Fifteen dollars?" whistled Whistlebinkie in amazement, for to him fifteen dollars was a princely sum.

"No," returned the Unwiseman. "Fifteen eclaires, and I was to do my own fighting with the ones whose hats were spoiled. That wouldn't pay, because before the end of the week I'd be in the hospital, and I am told that people in hospitals are not allowed to eat eclaires."

"And so you declined to go into that business?" asked Mollie.

"Exactly," returned the Unwiseman. "I felt very badly on my way back home, too. I had hoped that the hatter wanted to employ me as a demonstrator."

"A what?" cried Whistlebinkie.

"A demonstrator," repeated the Unwiseman. "A demonstrator is one who demonstrates – a sort of a show-man. In the hat business he would be a man who should put on new styles of hats so as to show people how people looked in them. I suggested that to the hatter, but he said no, it wouldn't do. It would make customers hopeless. They couldn't hope to look as well in his hats as I would, and so they wouldn't buy them; and as he wasn't in the hat trade for pleasure, he didn't feel that he could afford a demonstrator like me."

"And what did you do then?" asked Mollie.

"I was so upset that I got on board of a horse-car to ride home, forgetting that the horse-cars all ran the other way and that I hadn't five cents in my pocket. That came out all right though. I didn't have to walk any further," said the Unwiseman. "The conductor was so mad when he found out that I couldn't pay my fare that he turned the car around and took me back to the hatter's again, where I'd got on. It was a great joke, but he never saw it."

And the Unwiseman roared with laughter as he thought of the joke on the conductor, and between you and me, I don't blame him.

"Well, I got home finally, and was just about to throw myself down with my head out of the window to weep when I had an idea," continued the Unwiseman.

"With your head out of the window?" echoed Mollie. "What on earth was that for?"

"So that my tears wouldn't fall on the carpet, of course," returned the Unwiseman. "What else? I always weep out of the window. There isn't any use of my dampening the house up and getting rheumatism just because it happens to be easier to weep indoors. When you're as old as I am, you have to be careful how you expose yourself to dampness. Rheumatism might be fun for you, because you can stay home from school, and be petted while you have it, but for me it's a very serious matter. I had it so bad once I couldn't lean my elbow on the dinner-table, and it spoiled all the pleasure of dining."

"Well – go on and tell us what your idea was," said Mollie, with difficulty repressing a smile. "Are you going to patent your scheme of weeping through a window?"

"No, indeed," said the Unwiseman. "I'm willing to let the world have the benefit of my discoveries, and, besides, patenting things costs money, and you have to send in a model of your invention. I can't afford to build a house and employ a man to cry through a window just to supply the government with a model. My idea was this. As my tears fell to the ground my ears and nose got very cold – almost froze, in fact. There was the scheme in a nutshell. Tears rhyme with ears, nose with froze. Why not write rhymes for the comic papers?"

"Oho!" said Mollie; "I see. You are going to be a poet."

"That's the idea," said the Unwiseman. "There's heaps of money in it. I know a man who gets a dollar a yard for writing poetry. If I can write ten yards of it a week I shall make eight dollars anyhow, and maybe ten. All shop-keepers calculate to have remnants of their stock left over, and I've allowed two yards out of every ten for remnants. The chief trouble I have is in finding writing materials. I haven't any pen and ink; I don't own any slates; the only paper I have in the house is the wall paper and a newspaper, and I can't use them, because the wall paper is covered with flowers and the newspaper is where I get my ideas – besides, it's all the library I've got. I didn't know what to do until this morning when I got up and found the ground all covered with snow. Then it came to me all of a sudden, why not get a stick and write your poems on the snow, and then maybe, if you have luck, you call sell them before the thaw. I dressed hurriedly and hastened downstairs, moved the house up near yours, so that I'd be near you and be sure to see you, feeling confident that you could get your papa to come out and see the poems and maybe buy them for his paper. Before long I had written thirty yards of poetry, and just as I had finished what I thought was a fair day's work, up comes that horrid Gyp and prances the whole thing into nothing."

"Dear me!" said Whistlebinkie. "That was too bad."

"Wasn't it!" sighed the Unwiseman. "It was such a beautifully long poem – and what's more, it isn't easy work. It's almost as hard as shoveling snow, only, of course, you get better pay for it."

"You can rewrite it, can't you?" asked Mollie, gazing sadly at the havoc Gyp had wrought in the Unwiseman's work.