Page:The Gnome King of Oz.djvu/13

This page needs to be proofread.

The Gnome King of Oz

cotton-patches from their garden patches and stitch them into gay quilts but they did mending and darn-ing as well.

For miles around people brought their old clothes to Queen Cross Patch for repairs, so that Patch was as busy and prosperous a little Kingdom as you would find anywhere, but by no means a pleasant one. Constant picking of the scraps in their garden patches had made the Quilty men exceedingly serappy, and constant stitching upon the patch-work quilts had made the Quilty ladies extremely cross and crotchety. Indeed, everything about this little country was cross and patchy. All the roads were cross roads, and the houses as patched and shabby as the clothes of the people who lived in them.

But perhaps, of all the Quilties, the Queen, herself, was the crossest and patchiest. She even had a patch over her eye. She had strained it from too much fine sewing. Just now she was straining the other one in an effort to see that all of her subjects were hard at work. Finding that they were, she flounced across the room and sat down at her sewing table. Here, grumbling and scolding to herself, she began sorting patches into separate piles, according to their size and color. Except for her Majesty’s mumbles

16

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.