And THAT was what his mother had told him to do.
All the Beasts were lying on the bank of the river. Far away they heard the little, thin voice of Tommy Tortoise singing his song. They pricked up their ears, looking _this_ way and _that_ way as they listened.
And presently Tommy Tortoise came crawling up through the mud.
“What is it?” they cried, each in his own PARTICULAR voice. You would have thought that all the circuses in the world were there.
“Bojabi,” said Tommy Tortoise, and crawled away home without another word.
That night All the Beasts had bojabi for their supper.
[Illustration: THE KING OF ALL THE BEASTS]
After that All the Beasts in that wood were never hungry. They could always eat bojabi.
They made Tommy Tortoise their king. “For,” they said, “if he could remember the name of the bojabi tree, he can do anything.”
As far as I know he is king of All the Beasts in the Great Wood to-day.
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Bojabi Tree, by Edith Rickert and Gleb Botkin