Chapter 5

"The General got her to explain herself, and then he understood that she wanted him to have a grand review and sham battle of all the troops, in honor of the Khan and Khant; and the whole court had to be present, and especially the timidest of the ladies, that would almost scare a person to death by the way they screamed when they were frightened. The General was just going to say that the guns and cannon had all got rusty, and the powder was spoiled from not having been used for so long, with the everlasting cleaning up that had been going on; but the fairy godmother stamped her foot and sent him flying. So the only thing he could do was to set all the gnomes at work making guns and cannon and powder, and about twelve o'clock they had them ready, and just after lunch the sham battle began.

"The troops marched and counter-marched, and fired away the whole afternoon, and sprang mines and blew up magazines, and threw cannon crackers and cannon torpedoes. There was such an awful din and racket that you couldn't hear yourself think, and some of the court ladies were made perfectly sick by it. They all asked to be excused, but the fairy godmother wouldn't excuse one of them. She just kept them there on the seats round the battle-field, and let them shriek themselves hoarse. So many of them fainted that they had to have the garden hose brought, and they kept it sprinkling away on their faces all the afternoon.

"But it was a failure as far as the Khan and the Khant were concerned. The fairy godmother expected that as soon as the loudest firing began, the girl, whichever it was, would scream, and so they would know which was which. But the Khan and Khant's father had been a famous warrior, and he had been in the habit of taking his children to battle with him from their earliest years, partly because his wife was dead and he didn't dare trust them with the careless nurse at home, and partly because he wanted to harden their nerves. So now they just clapped their hands, and enjoyed the sham battle down to the ground.

"About sunset the fairy godmother gave it up. She had to, anyway. The troops had shot away all their powder, and the gnomes couldn't make any more till the next day. So she set out to return to the city, with all the court following her diamond chariot, and I can tell you she felt pretty gloomy. She told the Grand Vizier that now she didn't see any end to the trouble, and she was just going into hysterics when a barefooted boy came along driving his cow home from the pasture. The fairy godmother didn't mind it much, for she was in her chariot; but the court ladies were on foot, and they began to scream, 'Oh, the cow! the cow!' and to take hold of the knights, and to get on to the fence, till it was perfectly packed with them; and who do you think the fairy godmother found had scrambled up on top of her chariot?"

The nephew and niece were afraid to risk a guess, and the papa had to say:

"The Khant! The fairy godmother pulled her inside and hugged her and kissed her, she was so glad to find out that she was the one; and she stopped the procession on the spot, and she called up the Imam, and he married the Khant to Prince--"

The papa stopped, and as the niece and nephew hesitated, he said, very sternly, "Well?"

The fact is, they had got so mixed up about the Khan and the Khant of Tartary that they had forgotten which was Butterflyflutterby and which was Flutterbybutterfly. They tried, shouting out one the one and the other the other, but the papa said:

"Oh no! That won't work. I've had that sort of thing tried on me before, and it _never_ works. _I_ heard you whispering what you would do, and you have simply added the crime of double-dealing to the crime of inattention. The story has stopped, and stopped forever."

The nephew stretched himself and then sat up in bed. "Well, it had got to the end, anyway."

"Oh, _had_ it? What became of the wicked enchantress?" The nephew lay down again, in considerable dismay.

"Uncle," said the niece, very coaxingly, "_I_ didn't say it had come to the end."

"But it has," said the papa. "And I'm mighty glad you forgot the Prince's name, for the rule of this story is that it has to go on as long as any one listening remembers, and it might have gone on forever."

"I suppose," the nephew said, "a person may guess?"

"He may, if he guesses right. If he guesses wrong, he has to be thrown from a high tower--the same one the wicked enchantress was thrown from."

"There!" shouted the nephew; "you said you wouldn't tell. How high was the tower, anyway, uncle? As high as the Eiffel Tower in Paris?"

"Not quite. It was three feet and five inches high."

"Ho! Then the enchantress was a dwarf!"

"Who said she was a dwarf?"

"There wouldn't be any use throwing her from the tower if she wasn't."

"I didn't say it was any use. They just did it for ornament."

This made the nephew so mad that he began to dig the papa with his fist, and the papa began to laugh. He said, as well as he could for laughing: "You see, the trouble was to keep her from bouncing up higher than the top of the tower. She was light weight, anyway, because she was a witch; and after the first bounce they had to have two executioners to keep throwing her down--a day executioner and a night executioner; and she went so fast up and down that she was just like a solid column of enchantress. She enjoyed it first-rate, but it kept her out of mischief."

"Now, uncle," said the niece, "you're just letting yourself go. What did the fairy godmother do after they all got married?"

"Well, the story don't say exactly. But there's a report that when she became a fairy grandgodmother, she was not half so severe about cleaning up, and let the poor old General-in-Chief have some peace of his life--or some war. There was a rebellion among the genii not long afterwards, and the General was about ten or fifteen years putting them down."

The nephew had been lying quiet a moment. Now he began to laugh.

"What are you laughing at?" demanded his uncle.

"The way that Khant scrambled up on top of the chariot when the cow came along. Just like a girl. They're all afraid of cows."

The tears came into the niece's eyes; she had a great many feelings, and they were easily hurt, especially her feelings about girls.

"Well, she wasn't afraid of the cannon, anyway."

"That is a very just remark," said the uncle. "And now what do you say to breakfast?"

The children sprang out of bed, and tried which could beat to the door. They forgot to thank the uncle, but he did not seem to have expected any thanks.