old the Woodcutters, and they used to leave their village and go into
the woods. Then they cut down the trees, and sawed them into planks, and
shaped them into the parts of a house. When the house was finished,
they put numbers on all the parts, and took it to pieces again, and put
it on a raft; and the raft floated down the great river to the place
where the house had been ordered. Then they put up the house in a very
short time, because you see it was all ready made, and only had to be
put together.

These Woodcutters, then, came and settled for a while near the borders
of Mouseland; and in the course of their wanderings they found the stray
Camel. They promptly seized him, and carried him off.

When Sandy told the King what had happened, the Mouse King was very
angry indeed. He sent a detachment of his bodyguard, armed cap-a-pie, to
fetch the Woodcutters into his presence. The bodyguard captured two of
them, and led them back bound. Then the King demanded his Camel.

"Pooh, silly little Mouse," said the Woodcutters. "If you want it, you
must fetch it."

"I will," said the King of the Mice. "Tell your chief, whoever he is,
that I hereby declare war upon him."

The Woodcutters laughed, and went away.

Then the Mouse King gathered together all his subjects, millions and
millions of sturdy Mice; and they set out for the village of the
Woodcutters. The Woodcutters had by this time finished their job, and
they had been paid a good round sum of money for it; and the money was
carefully put away, with all the other money they had, in a treasury.

Now the Mice were not able to meet big Woodcutters in the field, but
they had their own tactics. Night and day they burrowed under the earth.
First they made for the treasury; and though the treasury had stone
walls, they got up easily through the floor, where no danger was
expected, and one by one they carried off every coin from the treasury,
until it was as bare as the palm of your hand. Then they got underneath
all the houses of the village; and thousands and millions of Mice were
busy all day and all night in carrying out little baskets of earth from
beneath the foundations. Thus it happened, that very soon the
Woodcutters' village was standing on a thin shell of earth, and
underneath it was a great hole.

Now was the time to strike the blow. The layer of earth was so thin,
that the least shock would destroy it. So the Mouse King wrote a letter
to the Woodcutter Chief,