"What I
meant was that I had finished making the new dress for Susie
Littletail, the rabbit girl."

"Good!" cried the bunny uncle. "A new dress for my little niece
Susie. That's fine! If you like, Nurse Jane, I'll take it to her."

"I wish you would," spoke the muskrat lady. "I have not time myself.
Just be careful of it. Don't let the bad fox or the skillery-scalery
alligator with humps on his ears bite holes in it."

"I won't," promised Uncle Wiggily. So taking the dress, which Nurse
Jane had sewed for Susie, over his paw, and with his tall silk hat
over his ears, and carrying his red, white and blue striped
barber-pole rheumatism crutch, off Uncle Wiggily started for the
Littletail home.

"Susie will surely like her dress," thought the rabbit gentleman.
"It has such pretty colors." For it had, being pink and blue and red
and yellow and purple and lavender and strawberry and lemon and
Orange Mountain colors. There may have been other colors in it, but
I can think of no more right away.

Uncle Wiggily was going along past Old Mother Hubbard's house, and
past the place where Mother Goose lived, when, coming to a place
near a big tree, Uncle Wiggily saw another house. And from inside
the house came a crying sound.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What shall I do?" sobbed a voice.

"Ah, ha! More trouble!" cried Uncle Wiggily. "I seem to be finding
lots of people in trouble lately. Well, now to see who this is!"

Going up to the house, and peering in a window, Uncle Wiggily saw a
little girl sitting before a fireplace. And this little girl was
crying.

"Hello!" called Uncle Wiggily, in his jolly voice, as he opened the
window. "What is the matter? Are you Little Bo Peep, and are you
crying because you have lost your sheep?"

"No, Uncle Wiggily," answered the little girl. "I am crying because
I have spoiled my nice new dress, and when my mother comes home and
finds it out she will whip me."

"Oh, no!" cried the bunny uncle. "Your mother will never do that.
But who are you?"

"Why, don't you know? I am little Polly Flinders, I sat among the
cinders, warming my pretty little toes. 'And her mother came and
caught her, and she whipped her little daughter, for spoiling her
nice new clothes.'

"That's what it says in the Mother Goose book," said Polly Flinders,
"and, of course, that's what will happen to me. Oh, dear! I don't
want to be whipped. And I didn't really spoil quite all my nice new
clothes. It's only my dress,