"Is that so?" she cried in dismay. "My goodness! You've been and gone and got the habit of being leader! And you can't stop! . . . I don't know what I'm going to do!" she wailed. "There'll be nothing left of me if this keeps up. I'll be nothing but fleece and bones if I have to run so much."
Somehow her friends didn't seem alarmed. Aunt Nancy was very fat. In fact she was so very, very fat that nobody thought she could waste away. And everybody smiled a little.
But she didn't notice that. And then a squeaky voice piped up:
"Is there an earthquake?"
It was Uncle Jerry Chuck peeping out of his hole, with his teeth chattering so fast that it seemed as if they must all drop out of his mouth.
"There's no earthquake," Aunt Nancy told him. "We just jumped off the wall upon this ledge—that's all."
"I was sure there was an earthquake," he said. "And the last quake was the worst of all."
There were more smiles then, for Aunt Nancy herself had been the last of the flock to plump down off the wall.
"I wish—" said Uncle Jerry Chuck—"I wish, when you folks jump the wall, you'd pick out a different place. You disturb me a dozen times a day. I'm losing lots of sleep on your account. And if I continue to lose my rest I'll be nothing but fur and bones."
Well, Uncle Jerry was fat, too. He looked as if it would do him a world of good to be thinner. But Aunt Nancy felt sorry for him.