Pipt has enchanted the bread and the cheese, so it will last me all through my journey, however much I eat."
"Why do you put those things into your mouth?" asked Scraps, gazing at him in astonishment. "Do you need more stuffing? Then why don't you use cotton, such as I am stuffed with?"
"I don't need that kind," said Ojo.
"But a mouth is to talk with, isn't it?"
"It is also to eat with," replied the boy. "If I didn't put food into my mouth, and eat it, I would get hungry and starve.
"Ah, I didn't know that," she said. "Give me some."
Ojo handed her a bit of the bread and she put it in her mouth.
"What next?" she asked, scarcely able to speak.
"Chew it and swallow it," said the boy.
Scraps tried that. Her pearl teeth were unable to chew the bread and beyond her mouth there was no opening. Being unable to swallow she threw away the bread and laughed.
"I must get hungry and starve, for I can't eat," she said.
"Neither can I," announced the cat; "but I'm not fool enough to try. Can't you understand that you and I are superior people and not made like these poor humans?"
"Why should I understand that, or anything else?" asked the girl. "Don't bother my head by asking conundrums, I beg of you. Just let me discover myself in my own way."
With this she began amusing herself by leaping across the brook and back again.
"Be careful, or you'll fall in the water," warned Ojo.
"Never mind."
"You'd better. If you get wet you'll be soggy and can't walk. Your colors might run, too," he said.
"Don't my colors run whenever I run?" she asked.
"Not in the way I mean. If they get wet, the reds and greens and yellows and purples of your patches might run into each other and become just a blur--no color at all, you know."
"Then," said the Patchwork Girl, "I'll be careful, for if I spoiled my splendid colors I would cease to be beautiful."
"Pah!" sneered the Glass Cat, "such colors are not beautiful; they're ugly, and in bad taste. Please notice that my body has no color at all. I'm transparent, except for my exquisite red heart and my lovely pink brains--you can see 'em work."
"Shoo--shoo--shoo!" cried Scraps, dancing around and laughing. "And your horrid green eyes, Miss Bungle! You can't see your eyes, but we can, and I notice you're very proud of what little color you have. Shoo, Miss Bungle, shoo--shoo--shoo! If you were all colors and many colors, as I am, you'd be too stuck up for anything." She leaped over the cat and back again, and the startled Bungle crept close to a tree to escape her. This made Scraps laugh more heartily than ever, and she said:
"Whoop-te-doodle-doo! The cat has lost her shoe. Her tootsie's bare, but she don't care, So what's the odds to you?"
"Dear me, Ojo," said the cat; "don't you think the creature is a little bit crazy?"
"It may be," he answered, with a puzzled look.
"If she continues her insults I'll scratch off her suspender-button eyes," declared the cat.
"Don't quarrel, please," pleaded the boy, rising to resume the journey. "Let us be good comrades and as happy and cheerful as possible, for we are likely to meet with plenty of trouble on our way."
It was nearly sundown when they came to the edge of the forest and saw spread out before them a delightful landscape. There were broad blue fields stretching for miles over the valley, which was dotted everywhere with pretty, blue domed houses, none of which, however, was very near to the place where they stood. Just at the point where the path left the forest stood a tiny house covered with leaves from the trees, and before this stood a Munchkin man with an axe in his hand. He seemed very much surprised when Ojo and Scraps and the Glass Cat came out of the woods, but as the Patchwork Girl approached nearer he sat down upon a bench and laughed so hard that he could not speak for a long time.
This man was a woodchopper and lived all alone in the little house. He had bushy blue whiskers and merry b