“What’s the matter with you?” Rusty asked his helper, Chippy, Jr. “When you first came to work for us you could slip through our doorway easily enough. But now you’re altogether too big.”
Chippy, Jr., said that the entrance to their house must have shrunk.
“How could it?” Rusty demanded impatiently.
“It rained last night,” the youngster reminded him.
But Rusty Wren said, “Nonsense! The doorway’s made of tin—not wood. You have grown—that’s the whole trouble! And you’ve got us into a pretty fix.”
“I begin to think that it was all planned this way by his father,” Mrs. Rusty told her husband, “so Mr. Chippy wouldn’t have to take care of his son. But I don’t intend to adopt a big, overgrown boy like him—not when I have six small children of my own!”
Chippy, Jr., couldn’t help feeling both uncomfortable and unhappy.
“I want to go home!” he blubbered. “It’s almost my bedtime. And my father and my mother won’t like it at all if I stay here all night.”
“Well,” said Rusty Wren, “I don’t know how you’re going to leave our house if you can’t squeeze through the door. So I’ll hurry over and tell your father about this trouble, and he can break the news gently to your mother.”
Then Rusty went off, flying directly to the stone wall where the Chippy family lived. And soon he was explaining to Mr. Chippy how his son was inside their house and couldn’t leave.