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“Well, that isn’t so bad,” said Uncle Wiggily. “It may be that I can clean it for you.” But when he looked at Polly’s dress he saw that it could not be fixed, for, like Pussy Cat Mole’s best petticoat, Polly’s dress had been burned through with hot coals, so that it was full of holes.
“No, that can’t be fixed, I’m sorry to say,” said Uncle Wiggily.
“Oh, dear!” sobbed Polly Flinders, as she sat among the cinders. “What shall I do? I don’t want to be whipped by my mother.”
“And you shall not be,” said the bunny uncle. “Not that I think she would whip you, but we will not give her a chance. See here, I have a new dress that I was taking to Susie Littletail. Nurse Jane can easily make my little rabbit niece another.
“So you take this one, and give me your old one. And when your mother comes she will not see the holes in your dress. Only you must tell her what happened, or it would not be fair. Always tell mothers and fathers everything that happens to you.”
“I will,” promised Polly Flinders.
She soon took off her old dress and put on the new one intended for Susie, and it just fitted her.
“Oh, how lovely!” cried Polly Flinders, looking at her toes.
“And now,” said Uncle Wiggily, “you must sit no more among the cinders.”
“I’ll not,” Polly promised, and she went and sat down in front of the looking-glass, where she could look proudly at the new dress—not too proudly, you understand, but just proud enough.
Polly thanked Uncle Wiggily, who took the old soiled and burned dress to Susie’s house. When the rabbit girl saw the bunny uncle coming she ran to meet him, crying:
“Oh! did Nurse Jane send you with my new dress?”
“She did,” answered Uncle Wiggily, “but see what happened to it on the way,” and he showed Susie the burned holes and all.
“Oh, dear!” cried the little rabbit girl, sadly. “Oh, dear!”
“Never mind,” spoke Uncle Wiggily, kindly, and he told all that had happened. It was a sort of adventure, you see.
“Oh, I’m glad you gave Polly my dress!” said Susie, clapping her paws.
“Nurse Jane shall make you another dress,” promised Uncle Wiggily, and the muskrat lady did. And when the mother of Polly Flinders came home she thought the new dress was just fine, and she did not whip her little daughter. In fact, she said she would not have done so anyhow. So that part of the Mother Goose book is wrong.
And thus everything came out all right, and if the shaving brush doesn’t whitewash the blackboard, so the chalk can’t dance on it with the pencil sharpener, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the garden maid.
CHAPTER XXV
UNCLE WIGGILY AND THE GARDEN MAID
“Hey, ho, hum!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily Longears, the rabbit gentleman, as he stretched up his twinkling, pink nose, and reached his paws around his back to scratch an itchy place. “Ho, hum! I wonder what will happen to me to-day?”
“Are you going out again?” asked Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper. “It seems to me that you go out a great deal, Mr. Longears.”
“Well, yes; perhaps I do,” admitted the bunny uncle. “But more things happen to me when I go out than when I stay in the house.”
“And do you like to have things happen to you?” asked Miss Fuzzy Wuzzy.
“When they are adventures I do,” answered the rabbit gentleman. “So here I go off for an adventure.”
Off started the nice, old, bunny uncle, carrying his red, white and blue striped barber-pole rheumatism crutch—over his shoulder this time. For his pain did not hurt him much, as the sun was shining, so he did not have to limp on the crutch, which Nurse Jane had gnawed for him out of a corn-stalk.
Uncle Wiggily had not gone very far toward the fields and woods before he heard Nurse Jane calling to him.
“Oh, Wiggy! Wiggy, I say! Wait a moment!”
“Yes, what is it?” asked the rabbit gentleman, turning around and looking over his shoulder. “Have I forgotten anything?”
“No, it was I who forgot,” said the muskrat lady housekeeper. “I forgot to tell you to bring me a bottle of perfume. Mine is all gone.”
“All right, I’ll bring you some,” promised Mr. Longears. “It will give me something to do—to go to the perfume store. Perhaps an adventure may happen to me there.”
Once more he was on his way, and soon he reached the perfume store, kept by a nice buzzing bee lady, who gathered sweet smelling perfume, as well as honey, from the flowers in Summer and put it carefully away for the Winter.
“Some perfume for Nurse Jane, eh?” said the bee lady, as the rabbit gentleman knocked on her hollow-tree house. “There you are, Uncle Wiggily,” and she gave him a bottle of the nice scent made from a number of flowers.
“My! That smells lovely!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily, as he pulled out the cork, and took a long sniff. “Nurse Jane will surely like that perfume!”
With the sweet scented bottle in his paw, the rabbit gentleman started back toward his hollow-stump bungalow. He had not gone very far before he saw a nurse maid, out in the garden, back of a big house. There was a basket in front of the maid, with some clothes in it, and stretched across the garden was a line, with more clothes on it, flapping in the wind.
“Ha!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily. “I wonder if that garden maid, hanging up the clothes, wouldn’t like to smell Nurse Jane’s perfume? Nurse Jane will not mind, and perhaps it will be doing that maid a kindness to let her smell something sweet, after she has been smelling washing-soap-suds all morning.”
So the bunny uncle, who was always doing kind things, hopped over to the garden maid, and politely asked:
“Wouldn’t you like to smell this perfume?” and he held out the bottle he had bought of the bee lady.
The garden maid turned around, and said in a sad voice:
“Thank you, Uncle Wiggily. It is very kind of you, I’m sure, and I would like to smell your perfume. But I can’t.”
“Why not?” asked the bunny uncle. “The cork is out of the bottle. See!”
“That may very well be,” went on the garden maid, “but the truth of the matter is that I cannot smell, because a blackbird has nipped off my nose.”
Uncle Wiggily, in great surprise, looked, and, surely enough, a blackbird had nipped off the nose of the garden maid.
“Bless my whiskers!” cried the bunny uncle. “What a thing for a blackbird to do—nip off your nose! Why did he do such an impolite thing as that?”
“Why, he had to do it, because it’s that way in the Mother Goose book,” said the maid. “Don’t you remember? It goes this way:
“‘The King was in the parlor,
Counting out his money,
The Queen was in the kitchen,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
Along came a blackbird
And nipped off her