equanimity, the child angrily paced back and forth. Such arrogance!…Such impertinence!…Such gall! It stuck in her craw. She paced faster and faster until it looked as if she were doing some kind of strange dance.

“Look! A gamboling gamine!” shouted one of the Hammer-Heads epigrammatically. Then, with an exaggerated litheness of limb and a womanly lissomeness, he minced back and forth with great élan in a cruel, mocking imitation of the girl. His cohorts behind the adjacent rocks laughed uncontrollably as if this queer posturing were the funniest thing they had ever seen.

Dorothy heard the invidious, pointed barb and was reminded of a time in Kansas when, on her way home from school, passing by a cul-de-sac, a couple of wayward urchins had waylaid her to make fun of her freckles. By comparison, that was good-natured raillery, innocuous badinage. But these outré antics were beyond the pale. The overt hostility of these bumptious misanthropes produced in her a raging, inundating enmity, and swift waves of rancor rose chokingly in her throat till she nearly gagged. But she decided she had already surmounted too many obstacles to give up now. With her inveterate hardihood—and despite a sudden, nearly paralyzing xenophobia—she tightened her will and vowed to get past these bellicose bullies one way or another.

The Scarecrow, now deep in a brown study, scratched his head. Dorothy, thinking that scratching her own head might help her think of a way to ease the situation’s mounting volatility, took off her Golden Cap and held it in her hand. But the ugly altercation had rankled her too much for her to concentrate. As her annoyance at the contumacious cabal festered in her mind, she kept mumbling to herself, “The insolence!…The audacity!…The impudence!…The effrontery!”

Her little litany of pejoratives was interrupted when an effulgent flash of sunlight suddenly struck the inside of the shiny brim of the Golden Cap and was providentially reflected directly into the Tin Woodman’s eye. “Look, Dorothy!” he said. “There’s something written inside the brim of your Cap!”

They all stared intently at the Cap. Etched into the metal, in tiny letters, were the words Whosoever possesses this Golden Cap shall command the Flying Monkeys. After that, in even smaller letters, were what appeared to be a string of magic words: Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke! Hil-lo, hol-lo, hel-lo! Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!

Remembering that it was the Monkeys who had abetted the Wicked Witch in her execrable acts, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were rather afraid to have anything to do with them. But then, realizing the Monkeys were merely acting according to protocol, the Scarecrow pushed aside his jaundiced point of view and pointed out that their seemingly iniquitous behavior was understandable because, whether they liked it or not, the Monkeys’ only fealty was to the owner of the Cap.

The Tin Woodman, still afraid, at first dissented. But then, because he didn’t want to usurp the Scarecrow’s authority, and because he realized a surcease of hostilities was unattainable because any attempt to verbally conciliate the