[Matterhorn Fan]

The Phantom Tollbooth is a masterpiece.

"Remarkable view," announced the Humbug, bouncing from the car as if he were responsible for the whole thing.

"Isn't it beautiful?" gasped Milo.

"Oh, I don't know," answered a strange voice. "It's all in the way you look at things."

"I beg your pardon?" said Milo, for he didn't see who had spoken.

"I said it's all in how you look at things," repeated the voice.

Milo turned around and found himself staring at two very neatly poilished bwoen shoes, for standing directly in front of him (if you can use the word "standing" for anyone suspended in mid-air) was another boy just about his age, whose feet were easily three feet off the ground.

"For instance," continued the boy, "if you happened to like deserts, you might not think this was beautiful at all."

"That's true," said the Humbug, who didn't like to contradict anyone whose feet were that far off the ground.

"For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered with tinsel, while the trees opened our presents."

"What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo.

"Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?"

"How do you manage to stand up there?" asked Milo, for this was the subject which most interested him.

"I about to ask you a similar question," answered the boy, "for you must be much older than you look to be standing on the ground."

"What do you mean?" Milo asked.

"Well," said the boy, "in my family everyone is born in the air, with his head at exactly the height it's going to be when he's an adult, and then we all grow toward the ground. When we're fully grown up or, as you can see, grown down, our feet finally touch. Of course, there are a few of us whose feet never reach the ground no matter how old we get, but I suppose it's the same in every family."

He hopped a few steps in the air, skipped back to where he started, and then began again.

"You certainly must be very old to have reached the ground already."

"Oh no," said Milo seriously, "In my family we all start on the ground and grow up, and we never know how far until we actually get there."

"What a silly system." The boy laughed. "Then you head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you're fifteen things won't look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again."

"I suppose so," replied Milo, for he had never really thought about the matter.

"We always see things from the same angle," the boy continued. "It's much less trouble that way. Besides, it makes more sense to grown down and not up. When you're very young, you can never hurt yourself falling down if you're in mid-air, and you certainly can't get into trouble for scuffing up your shoes or marking the floor if there's nothing to scuff them on and the floor is three feet away."

"That's very true," thought Tock, who wondered how the dogs in the family liked the arrangement.