The Royal Book of Oz

"

Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, who had been staring fixedly at the Professor with her silver suspender-button eyes, now sprang to her feet:

"What is a genealogist?

It's something no one here has missed;

What puts such notions in your head?

Turn out your toes—or go to bed!"

she shouted gaily, then, catching Ozma's disapproving glance, fell over backwards.

"I don't understand it at all," said Jack Pumpkinhead in a depressed voice. "I'm afraid my head's too ripe."

"Nor I," said Tik-Tok, the copper clockwork man. "Please wind me up a lit-tle tight-er Dor-o-thy, I want to think!"

Dorothy obligingly took a key suspended from a hook on his back and wound him up under his left arm. Everybody began to talk at once, and what with the Cowardly Lion's deep growl and Tik-Tok's squeaky voice and all the rest of the tin and meat and wooden voices, the confusion was terrible.

"Wait!" cried Ozma, clapping her hands.

Immediately the room grew so still that one could hear Tik-Tok's machinery whirring 'round.

"Now!" said Ozma, "One at a time, please, and let us hear from the Scarecrow first."

The Scarecrow rose. "I think, your Highness," he said modestly, "that anyone who has studied his Geozify already knows who we are and—"

"Who you are?" broke in the Wogglebug scornfully—"Of course they do—but I shall tell them who you were!"

"Who I were?" gasped the Scarecrow in a dazed voice, raising his cotton glove to his forehead. "Who I were? Well, who were I?"

"That's just the point," said Professor Wogglebug. "Who were you? Who were your ancestors? Where is your family? Where is your family tree? From what did you descend?"

At each question, the Scarecrow looked more embarrassed. He repeated the last one several times.

"From what did I descend? From what did I descend? Why, from a bean pole!" he cried.

This was perfectly true, for Dorothy, a little girl blown by a Kansas cyclone to the Kingdom of Oz, had discovered the Scarecrow in a farmer's cornfield and had lifted him down from his pole.