pened Jimmie, who had hold of the strings that
were fast to the boards, pulled them with his bill, and down clattered
the stones, rattlety-bang-go-bung-ker-plunk, right on top of the heads of
those two bad foxes! Oh, how scared they were!

"The house is falling! The house is falling! Run away!" cried one fox and
they both ran as fast as they could, glad enough to escape, I tell you.
Now, wasn't that a good trick Jimmie played on those bad animals?

I thought so, myself, and so did his grandpa and his papa and mamma, to
say nothing of Uncle Wiggily Longears. And that's how the foxes didn't eat
up the ducks, and to-morrow night, if the robin sings under my window as
sweetly as he did yesterday morning, you shall hear about how Aunt Lettie
came on a visit.

STORY XIII

A VISIT FROM AUNT LETTIE

One day it was so very pleasant out of doors that Lulu and Alice and
Jimmie Wibblewobble didn't want to go to school. The sun was sparkling on
the water in the duck pond, and Alice said, as she felt the wind blowing
on her feathers:

"Oh, I just wish I could go see the fairy prince again!"

"Pooh! I don't," spoke Jimmie. "But I wish we could stay home from school.
Bully, the frog, and I were going to get up a baseball nine. Let's go ask
papa if we can stay home."

"Can't I play on your ball team?" asked Lulu, who could throw a stone
almost as well as a boy.

"No," said Jimmie. "Girls never play on ball teams."

"Couldn't I even umpire?" went on his sister.

"No, Uncle Wiggily Longears is going to do that," replied Jimmie. "Billie
and Johnnie Bushytail and Sammie Littletail are going to play on the team.
But let's go ask papa if we can stay home. It's too nice to go to
school."

So they went and asked Mr. Wibblewobble, who had remained at home from
work that day, because, you see, he happened to swallow a shoe button by
mistake for a grain of corn, and he had indigestion something awful; yes,
really.

You know it was a tan shoe button, and if your eyesight isn't very good,
why it does look like a grain of corn, especially if you're very hungry
and in a hurry. So Mr. Wibblewobble wasn't feeling very well when Jimmie
and Lulu came in to ask him if they could stay home from school, and he
was the least bit cross, perhaps, because his indigestion was really very
bad at that moment. So he answered them:

"No, indeed, you can't stay home. Go to school at once! Quack!"

Now when a duck says one quack, instead of a