The Gnomemobile. Upton Sinclair
Here is a different kind,” he added, as he poured out the coffee. “Be careful now, for this is a mischievous spirit, and he will bite your tongue if he can.”
Of course the butler in the home of a lumber king would see to it that the thermos bottle contained good coffee, and the right amount of cream and sugar. Bobo was loud in his cries of delight, and Rodney explained that it was the spirit of the sun which the big people had learned to pen up in a bottle and take into their stomachs.
He told them how the lemons had come from Southern California, and the sugar from Louisiana, and the coffee from Brazil, and the butter from Denmark. All this was not so easy to understand, for the little forest creatures did not know that the earth was so big, and while they had learned that there were oceans, they did not understand how ships could sail upon them. When you were trying to help an old gnome to be happy, it was a mistake to speak of ships, and have to tell him that many of them were made out of murdered trees.
Elizabeth gave each of them a small piece of sandwich; and Rodney had to explain how wheat was grown and ground, and how butter and cheese were made from the milk of cows. Glogo took all this with quiet dignity; but Bobo was full of curiosity and fun, and nibbled his bread and his butter and his cheese, each one separately. A banana had to be cut into small slices, so that he could get comfortable bites out of it; then Rodney had to tell him about the strange kind of forests in which these plants grew, so different from the giant redwoods. Yet they were very old plants too; their ancestors had been on earth for millions of years, and had furnished food for all sorts of people. Some of them were small people, said Rodney, known as pygmies, but they were much bigger than gnomes, and Rodney did not think that Bobo would like to have a pygmy lady for a wife. Besides, she would speak Portuguese, or Indian, or some other language he wouldn’t understand.
“By the way,” said Rodney to Glogo, “I have been meaning to ask you, how does it happen that your people speak English?”
“English?” said the old gnome. “What is that?”
“That is the name of the language you speak.”
“What a strange idea!” commented Glogo. “I had in mind to ask you how you came to speak Gnomic.” And so that was that.
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