But this spring Snickchoo had more orders for carved cuckoo clocks and walking sticks and dinner plates and statuettes than he could manage. Also his work was more and more frequently interrupted by the yelp for help of a neighbor (in The Surge of the Urge).Once Snickchoo was detained for a week, sitting up with -- or, rather, sitting down upon Glump the Candler -- while Glump's wife hurried her monthly taffy-making. She rushed in with a taffy-tongue-full just in time to keep the taffy-daffy Glump from ascending the chimney in search of a full-pull.
Then, when Snickchoo tottered, drained and weary, into his hut, he discovered that (again!) his snails had streaked off to compete in a Track Meet in the Bosky Dell, leaving his calendar in disarray.
How was he to remember the days remaining until the first dark moon after the last rising of the Dog-Star just before sunup?
Desperately improvising, Snickchoo knotted his black shoelaces (like licorice laces) for each day he remembered. In the midst of his work, he would repeatedly count forward the remaining days until the darkness of The Great Urge, matching days with the carved wooden buttons of his jacket.
Unexpectedly, there came a lonely midnight when Snickchoo labored lovingly over the sassafrass head of a giant stirring rod for The Autumn Cider Festival. Suddenly Snickchoo was seized with a clambering cramp in the middle bulge of his bandy belly! A cramp that crawled like a crankous grass-crab! From the nails of this toes to his eartips!
Snickchoo dropped knife and carving in gibbering fright. He instantly knew the import of this crisis. Because of those derelict snails competing in the Track Meet in the Bosky Dell, he'd lost track of the days. So he'd failed to doctor himself with antidotal dottles of licorice at regular intervals. Now The Great Urge surged!
Out of control, Snickchoo ripped the licorice chest from its fastening under the workbench and seized the gleaming laces of candied sweetmeat.
Alas! In an ordinary crisis, this store of licorice would have lasted until daybreak broke the fell spell. But now, in this never-before-never-thought-about crisis, the licorice vanished in a gaggle of gobbles, while the cramp-crab crawled onto his scalp!
Snickchoo ran howling from his hut. Down hollows, up hills. Lashed by tree limbs, legs ripped by cockleburrs and thorns. Cramming pine-needles into his mouth as punishment to counteract his ague of appetite. Hour by hour, as a tormenting desire for LICORICE racked him, he still remembered to search eastern treetops for the rosy-lemony-wintergreen-icing of daybreak that would break this fell spell.
Suddenly his heart leapt in the middle of his bandy belly. Hark! The opening notes of the marzipan mallow, trilling its spring-rondeau to awaken the sun. He was saved!
Crying joyously, Snickchoo whirled around too fast, tripped and fell over a vagrant root. Breathless, numb, quaking in confusion, he kenned he was being dragged up the path to a house. The Candy Miser had him in thrall! Dragging his hapless form toward a candy-strewn hearth!
Limbs waggling limply, nostrils aquiver, Snickchoo scented that root he still dared not face. He covered his eyes in wild protestations. But the Candy Miser uncovered his face, ruthlessly dangling over Snickchoo's proffered red tongue the licorice laces he desired.
Overcome, Snickchoo shrieked and gnashed the bundle in two. Snatching handfuls of sweet snaky twills, he ran from the cabin, gibbering and gobbling, into the licorice of night.
The Candy Miser found Snickchoo, on hill slope, listening to the last plaintive notes of the spring-rondeau of the marzipan mallow, as the sun rose in a splendor of divinity fudge. Taking the uneaten laces that Snickchoo no longer desired, the Candy Miser totaled the bill.
"You ate my licorice laces. You know you must repay. You agree? Then sign here!"
Scribbling his "Snickchoo" without reading the pledge, receiving the rolled birchbark copy, the disgraced Gelf sadly slunk to his hut.
(Ready for Chapter 3?)