HE found Bedelia fast asleep and apparently in small need of a sedative, and, leaving the prescription on her pillow, retired to his perch in a rather disgusted frame of mind. And none too soon, for immediately the wheels inside him ceased to go around and he became dead to the world until someone should come along with a key.
Not until next morning was it discovered the baby cub was missing. Terrified by the dire result of his heartless prank, and apprehensive of condign punishment, he had flown no one knew whither, and truth to tell, nobody appeared to care a nickel, but all declared that the room of such an ill-behaved little animal was indeed preferable to his company.
For the alligator had been greatly liked and his untimely and wholly unnecessary taking off was mourned by a large circle of sorrowing friends.
To be sure, he had always from the very first insisted upon passing himself off as the real thing, and would have been mortally offended had anyone intimated that he was not a stuffed alligator. “When I was really alive,” and “before I came to be stuffed” had been favorite prefaces to some of his rather long-winded stories concerning his former life in Florida.
But as the guinea pig remarked, one meets with so many shams in society that it really doesn’t pay to be too censorious, even if one does know alligator hide from papier-mache.
Meanwhile Bedelia, stiff and sore from her ducking was not nearly as sore and stiff as she made herself out to be. The loss of Little Breeches had rendered her even more furious than had the disappearance of the twins. Only in this case she was unable to vent her feelings on the head of her husband, for which he sincerely thanked his lucky stars. As long as Bedelia posed as an invalid, he did his best to be kind and gentle, but it was hard work, for his wife was certainly past-master in the art of being provoking.
Suddenly seized with a new idea, she declared that she was going into a decline and took to composing poetry in imitation of Miss Palmer, to whose verses she had often listened while sitting up stiff and straight and apparently deaf and dumb in the nursery.
As neither Peter Pan nor Bedelia could write, the embryo poetess had no means whatever of recording her literary ventures and was obliged to depend upon her memory for the reproduction of her ideas. And as she not infrequently forgot the most telling points, the result was often disastrous. Her newly discovered gift was, of course, no secret to the society of the nursery and all were anxious to hear some of the verses which Bedelia had, thus far, kept entirely to herself. It was quite evident to any casual observer that Bedelia had become possessed of the divine afflatus. She would sit for hours at a time gazing mournfully into space, looking at one spot until, as Tim the crow vowed, she very nearly looked a hole through it. “Bedelia-sit-by-the-hour” he christened her, being something of a wit himself, although he was too well-mannered ever to thrust the fact on anyone else.
At length curiosity became unbearable, and the stuffed guinea pig who was looked upon as a person of culture, was deputed to request that Bedelia would give a reading of her own compositions. To which proposition she readily, not to say delightedly, consented, and it was at once arranged that the affair should take place that evening in the nursery, of course.