"We remember all that. But where it came
_from_ is what we thought _you'd_ know." He closed the illustrated
paper and moved it out of reach, while the man brushed from his beard
the grass and stuff that Judy had arranged there cleverly in a
decorative pattern.
"From?" repeated Uncle Felix, as though the word were unfamiliar.
"Your body and mind," the boy resumed, ignoring the pretence that
laziness offered in place of information, "and all that kind of thing;
trees and mountains, and birds and caterpillars and people like Aunt
Emily, and clergymen and volcanoes and elephants--oh, everything in
the world everywhere?"
There was another sigh. And another pause dropped down upon creation,
while they watched a looper caterpillar that clung to the edge of the
illustrated paper and made futile circles in the air with the knob it
called its head. Some one had forgotten to let down the ladder it
expected, or perhaps it, too, was asking unanswerable questions of the
sun.
"I believe," announced Judy, still smarting under a sense of recent
neglect, "it just came from nowhere. It's all in a great huge circle.
And we go round and round and rounder," she went on, as no one met her
challenge, "till we're finished!"
She avoided her brother's eye, but glanced winningly at Uncle Felix,
remembering that she had gained support from him before by a similar
device.
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