“Here is more trouble,” said Uncle Wiggily. “Can you fix Susie’s doll so she will sing, for the doll is a little girl one, just like Susie, and her name is Sallieann Peachbasket Shortcake.”
The monkey-doodle man in the toy store looked at the doll.
“I can fix her,” he said. Going in his back-room workshop, where there were rocking-horses that needed new legs, wooden soldiers who had lost their guns, and steamboats that had forgotten their whistles, the toy man soon had Susie’s doll mended again as well as ever. So that she said: “Papa! Mama! I love you! I am hungry!” And she laughed: “Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho!” and she sang:
“I am a little dollie,
’Bout one year old.
Please take me where it’s warm, for I
Am feeling rather cold.
If you’re not in a hurry,
It won’t take me very long,
To whistle or to sing for you
My pretty little song.”
“Hurray!” cried Uncle Wiggily when he heard this. “Susie’s dolly is all right again. Thank you, Mr. Monkey-Doodle, I’ll take her to Susie.” Then Uncle Wiggily paid the toy-store keeper and hurried off with Susie’s doll.
Uncle Wiggily had not gone very far before, all at once from around the corner of a snowbank he heard a sad, little voice crying:
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
“My goodness!” said the bunny uncle. “Some one else is in trouble. I wonder who it can be this time?”
He looked, and saw a little boy standing in the snow.
“Hello!” cried Uncle Wiggily, in his jolly voice. “Who are you, and what’s the matter?”
“I am Little Tommie Tucker,” was the answer. “And the matter is I’m hungry.”
“Hungry, eh?” asked Uncle Wiggily. “Well, why don’t you eat?”
“I guess you forgot about me and the Mother Goose book,” spoke the boy. “I’m in that book, and it says about me:
“‘Little Tommie Tucker,
Must sing for his supper.
What shall he eat?
Jam and bread and butter.’”
“Well?” asked Uncle Wiggily. “Why don’t you sing?”
“I—I can’t!” answered Tommie. “That’s the trouble. I have caught such a cold that I can’t sing. And if I don’t sing Mother Goose won’t know it is I, and she won’t give me any supper. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! And I am so hungry!”
“There now, there! Don’t cry,” kindly said the bunny uncle, patting Tommie Tucker on the head. “I’ll soon have you singing for your supper.”
“But how can you when I have such a cold?” asked the little boy. “Listen. I am as hoarse as a crow.”
And, truly, he could no more sing than a rusty gate, or a last year’s door-knob.
“Ah, I can soon fix that!” said Uncle Wiggily. “See, here I have Susie Littletail’s talking and singing doll, which I have just had mended. Now you take the doll in your pocket, go to Mother Goose, and when she asks you to sing for your supper, just push the button in the doll’s back. Then the doll will sing and Mother Goose will think it is you, and give you bread and jam.”
“Oh, how fine!” cried Tommie Tucker. “I’ll do it!”
“But afterward,” said Uncle Wiggily, slowly shaking his paw at Tommie, “afterward you must tell Mother Goose all about the little joke you played, or it would not be fair. Tell her the doll sang and not you.”
“I will,” said Tommie. He and Uncle Wiggily went to Mother Goose’s house, and when Tommie had to sing for his supper the doll did it for him. And when Mother Goose heard about it she said it was a fine trick, and that Uncle Wiggily was very good to think of it.
Then the bunny uncle took Susie’s mended doll to her, and the next day Tommie’s cold was all better and he could sing for his supper himself, just as the book tells about.
And if the little mouse doesn’t go to sleep in the cat’s cradle and scare the milk bottle so it rolls off the back stoop, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and Pussy Cat Mole.
CHAPTER IX
UNCLE WIGGILY AND PUSSY CAT MOLE
“Oh, dear! I don’t believe he’s ever coming!” said Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, as she stood at the window of the hollow-stump bungalow one day, and looked down through the woods.
“For whom are you looking, Nurse Jane?” asked Uncle Wiggily Longears, the rabbit gentleman. “If it’s for the letter-man, I think he went past some time ago.”
“No, I wasn’t looking for the letter-man,” said the muskrat lady. “I am expecting a messenger-boy cat to bring home my new dress from the dressmaker’s, but I don’t see him.”
“A new dress, eh?” asked Uncle Wiggily. “Pray, what is going on?”
“My dress is going on me, as soon as it comes home, Uncle Wiggily,” the muskrat lady answered, laughingly. “And then I am going on over to the house of Mrs. Wibblewobble, the duck lady. She and I are going to have a little tea party together, if you don’t mind.”
“Mind? Certainly not! I’m glad to have you go out and enjoy yourself,” said Uncle Wiggily, jolly like and also laughing.
“But I can’t go if my new dress doesn’t come,” went on Nurse Jane. “That is, I don’t want to.”
“Look here!” said the bunny uncle, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Nurse Jane, I’ll go for your dress myself and bring it home. I have nothing to do. I’ll go get your dress at the dressmaker’s.”
“Will you, really?” cried the muskrat lady. “That will be fine! Then I can curl my whiskers and tie a new pink bow for my tail. You are very good, Uncle Wiggily.”
“Oh, not at all! Not at all!” the rabbit gentleman said, modest like and shy. Then he hopped out of the hollow-stump bungalow and across the fields and through the woods to where Nurse Jane’s dressmaker made dresses.
“Oh, yes, Nurse Jane’s dress!” exclaimed Mrs. Spin-Spider, who wove silk for all the dresses worn by the lady animals of Woodland. “Yes, I have just finished it. I was about to call a messenger-boy cat and send it home, but now you are here you may take it. And here is some cloth I had left over. Nurse Jane might want it if ever she tears a hole in her dress.”
Uncle Wiggily put the extra pieces of cloth in his pocket, and then Mrs. Spin-Spider wrapped Nurse Jane’s dress up nicely for him in tissue paper, as fine as the web which she had spun for the silk, and the rabbit gentleman started back to the hollow-stump bungalow.
Mrs. Spin-Spider lived on Second Mountain, and, as Uncle Wiggily’s bungalow was on First Mountain, he had quite a way to go to get home. And when he was about half way there he passed a little house near a gray rock that looked like an eagle, and in the house he heard a voice saying:
“Oh,