wanted to pick far and high he walked on a far and high pair of stilts. 

Baby pickers on baby stilts were picking baby balloons. When they fell off the stilts the handful of balloons they were holding kept them in the air till they got their feet into the stilts again. 

“Who is that away up there in the sky climbing like a bird in the morning?” Ax Me No Questions asked her father. 

“He was singing too happy,” replied the father. “The songs came out of his neck and 13 made him so light the balloons pulled him off his stilts.” 

13

“Will he ever come down again back to his own people?” 

“Yes, his heart will get heavy when his songs are all gone. Then he will drop down to his stilts again.” 

The train was running on and on. The engineer hooted and tooted the whistle when he felt like it. The fireman rang the bell when he felt that way. And sometimes the open-and-shut of the steam hog had to go pfisty-pfoost, pfisty-pfoost. 

“Next is the country where the circus clowns come from,” said Gimme the Ax to his son and daughter. “Keep your eyes open.” 

They did keep their eyes open. They saw cities with ovens, long and short ovens, fat stubby ovens, lean lank ovens, all for baking either long or short clowns, or fat and stubby or lean and lank clowns. 

After each clown was baked in the oven it 14 was taken out into the sunshine and put up to stand like a big white doll with a red mouth leaning against the fence. 

14

Two men came along to each baked clown standing still like a doll. One man threw a bucket of white fire over it. The second man pumped a wind pump with a living red wind through the red mouth. 

The clown rubbed his eyes, opened his mouth, twisted his neck, wiggled his ears, wriggled his toes, jumped away from the fence and began turning handsprings, cartwheels, somersaults and flipflops in the sawdust ring near the fence. 

“The next we come to is the Rootabaga Country where the big city is the Village of Liver-and-Onions,” said Gimme the Ax, looking again in his pocket to be sure he had the long slick yellow leather slab ticket with a blue spanch across it. 

The 

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