"The violets are for sight, smell, and touch, the elf told me; but there are still wanting hearing and taste."
She beat time, and there was music—not such, however, as sounded in the wood at the elfin fête; no, such as is heard at times in the kitchen. It came suddenly, like the wind whistling down the chimney. The pots and the pans boiled over, and the shovel thundered against the large brass kettle. It stopped as suddenly as it had commenced; and then was only to be heard the smothered song of the tea-kettle, which was so strange with its tones rising and falling, and the little pot and the large pot boiling, the one not troubling itself about the other, as if neither could think. Then the little mouse moved her time-stick faster and faster; the pots bubbled up and boiled over; the wind roared in the chimney; the commotion was so great that the little mouse herself got frightened, and dropped the stick.
"It was hard work to make that soup," cried the old king; "but where is the result—the dish?"
"That is all," said the little mouse, courtesying.
"All! Then let us hear what the next has to tell," said the king.
III.
WHAT THE SECOND MOUSE HAD TO RELATE.
"I was born in the palace library," said the second mouse. "I, and several members of my family there, have never had the good fortune to enter the dining-room, let alone the pantry. It was only when I first began my travels, and now again to-day, that I have even beheld a kitchen. We had often to endure hunger in the library, but we acquired much knowledge. The report of the reward offered by royalty for the discovery of the process by which soup could be made of a sausage-stick reached us even up there, and my grandmother thereupon looked for a manuscript which, though she could not read herself, she had heard read, wherein it was said,—
"'A poet can make soup out of a sausage-stick.'
"She asked me if I were a poet. I confessed I was not, to which she replied that I must go and try to become one. I begged to know what was to be done to acquire this art, for it appeared to me about as difficult to attain as to make the soup itself. But my grandmother had heard a good deal of reading, and she told me that the three things principally necessary were—good sense, imagination, and feeling. 'If thou canst go and furnish thyself with these, thou wilt be a poet; and there will be every chance of thy success in the matter of the sausage-stick.'