kettle. It stopped as suddenly as it had commenced;
and then was only to be heard the smothered song of the tea-kettle,
which was so strange with its tones rising and falling, and the little
pot and the large pot boiling, the one not troubling itself about the
other, as if neither could think. Then the little mouse moved her
time-stick faster and faster; the pots bubbled up and boiled over; the
wind roared in the chimney; the commotion was so great that the little
mouse herself got frightened, and dropped the stick.

"It was hard work to make that soup," cried the old king; "but where
is the result--the dish?"

"That is all," said the little mouse, courtesying.

"All! Then let us hear what the next has to tell," said the king.

III.

WHAT THE SECOND MOUSE HAD TO RELATE.

"I was born in the palace library," said the second mouse. "I, and
several members of my family there, have never had the good fortune to
enter the dining-room, let alone the pantry. It was only when I first
began my travels, and now again to-day, that I have even beheld a
kitchen. We had often to endure hunger in the library, but we acquired
much knowledge. The report of the reward offered by royalty for the
discovery of the process by which soup could be made of a
sausage-stick reached us even up there, and my grandmother thereupon
looked for a manuscript which, though she could not read herself, she
had heard read, wherein it was said,--

"'A poet can make soup out of a sausage-stick.'

"She asked me if I were a poet. I confessed I was not, to which she
replied that I must go and try to become one. I begged to know what
was to be done to acquire this art, for it appeared to me about as
difficult to attain as to make the soup itself. But my grandmother had
heard a good deal of reading, and she told me that the three things
principally necessary were--good sense, imagination, and feeling. 'If
thou canst go and furnish thyself with _these_, thou wilt be a poet;
and there will be every chance of thy success in the matter of the
sausage-stick.'

"So I set off to the westward, out into the wide world, to become a
poet.

"_Good sense_ I knew was the most important of all things, the two
other qualities not being so highly esteemed. So I went first after
good sense. Well, where did it dwell? 'Go to the ant; consider her
ways, and be wise,' a great king of the Hebrews has said. I knew this
from the library, and I never stopped until I reached a