: The Gnome King of Oz by Thompson Ruth Plumly Neill John R John Rea Illustrator Baum L Frank Lyman Frank Other - Oz (Imaginary place) Juvenile fiction; Fantasy fiction

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The Gnome King of Oz

The Reilly & Lee Co. Chicago

But scarcely had I begun on the first birthday, which happened to be Cap'n Bill's and which Dorothy had written me all about, when a special radiogram arrived from the Emerald City. Ruggedo, the old Gnome King, had escaped from Runaway Island. The Patchwork Girl had disappeared from the Capital. You can imagine how anxiously I waited for further news. Would Ruggedo succeed in capturing Oz? Where was Scraps? How would the adventure end?

How are you all? Happy? As for me, I kinda feel like Scraps to-day, full of rhymes and jingles. I feel that way When I think of you and the folks I've met in Oz and the letters I'm sure to get When you've read this book. Three cheers! Hurray! I'm looking for letters. Looking right your way!

RUTH PLUMLY THOMPSON

With lots of love and a little laugh, For a little boy almost three and a half! If I had a wish, I'd wish it quick And keep him always "Little Dick."

R. P. T.

List of Chapters

Queen Cross Patch, the Sixth, stood at her castle window staring crossly down at her cross-patch country. From above it looked like a huge patch-work quilt, spread over the rolling hills of the Winkie Country in Oz. Each of her subjects had a separate cotton-patch, and as each patch produced a different color of cotton and each patch-worker dressed himself and his family in the color of his patch and painted his house the same color too, you can imagine the odd appearance of the Kingdom itself. The Quilties, as the people of Patch were pleased to call themselves, did most of the patch-work in Oz and, as the Kingdoms of Oz are nearly all old-fashioned enough to use and appreciate patch-work quilts, there was plenty of work to be done. Not only did the industrious Quilties gather the small cotton-patches from their garden patches and stitch them into gay quilts but they did mending and darning 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 scrappy, 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 and the occasional snores of a scissor bird, who dozed on a perch by the window, there was not a sound in the great chamber. But suddenly, with a shrill scream, the Queen flung a handful of patches into the air, toppled off her three-legged throne and went entirely to pieces--extremely small pieces, too.

"Help!" shrieked the Scissor Bird, wakening with a bounce. "Help! Help! The Queen has gone to pieces!" At the Scissor Bird's sharp outcries, the Prime Piecer and Chief Scrapper of Patch fairly rushed through the doorway.

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