be home now.”

64

“After you tell us a story,” they reminded him.

“I can only tell you a sad story all mixed up to-night,” he reminded them, “because all day to-day I have been thinking about Bozo the Button Buster.”

“Tell us about Bozo the Button Buster,” said the girls, feeling in their hair and fixing the yellow roses.

The old man sat down on the front steps. His eyes swept away off toward a corner of the sky heavy with mist where it seemed to be moving with firetails, fishes, cats, and rabbits of slow changing stars.

“Bozo had buttons all over him,” said the old man, “the buttons on Bozo fitted so tight, and there were so many buttons, that sometimes when he took his lungs full of new wind to go 65on talking a button would bust loose and fly into the face of whoever he was speaking to. Sometimes when he took new wind into his lungs two buttons would bust loose and fly into the faces of two people he was speaking to.

65

“So people said, ‘Isn’t it queer how buttons fly loose when Bozo fills his lungs with wind to go on speaking?’ After a while everybody called him Bozo the Button Buster.

“Now, you must understand, Bozo was different from other people. He had a string tied to him. It was a long string hanging down with a knot in the end. He used to say, ‘Sometimes I forget where I am; then I feel for the string tied to me, and I follow the string to where it is tied to me; then I know where I am again.’

“Sometimes when Bozo was speaking and a button busted loose, he would ask, ‘Was that a mouse? Was that a mouse?’ And sometimes he said to people, ‘I’ll talk with you—if you haven’t got a mouse in your pocket.’

66“The last day Bozo ever came to the Village of Cream Puffs, he stood on the public square and he was all covered with buttons, more buttons than ever before, and all the buttons fitting tight, and five, six buttons busting loose and flying into the air whenever he took his lungs full of wind to go on speaking.

66

“‘When the sky began to fall who was it ran out and held up the sky?’ he sang out. ‘It was 

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