Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.djvu/302

264 Then I understood how it was that one sometimes seesgoing through the woods in a still eveningone fern-leaf rocking steadily on, all by itself. Haven't you ever seen that? Try if you can see the fairy-sleeper on it, next time; but don't pick the leaf, whatever you do; let the little one sleep on!

But all this time Bruno was getting sleepier and sleepier. "Sing, sing!" he murmured fretfully. Sylvie looked to me for instructions. "What shall it be?" she said.

"Could you sing him the nursery-song you once told me of?" I suggested. "The one that had been put through the mind-mangle, you know. 'The little man that had a little gun,' I think it was."

"Why, that are one of the Professor's songs!" cried Bruno. "I likes the little man; and I likes the way they spinned himlike a teetle-totle-tum." And he turned a loving look on the gentle old man who was sitting at the other side of his leaf-bed, and who instantly began to sing, accompanying himself on his Outlandish guitar, while the snail, on which he sat, waved its horns in time to the music.