“Bless my feathers! Now how in the world did that happen?” he said. “This place must be bewitched!”
He looked around, painfully twisting his neck, then sat still on a branch for a long time, watching and thinking, but he failed to find a single clue leading to the cause of the damage. At length he gave it up and went to work to repair it. First he looked all around carefully, then dashed away to the place where the thistles grew, planning to grab a billful of down and fly back in the briefest possible time. But the moment he was out of sight Snythergen took to his roots and ran toward the place where he had told the pig to meet him, tearing off his tree suit as he ran, and he had barely gotten out of it when the finch flew screeching by.
“This time I fooled you,” thought Snythergen, as he stretched out on the ground for a nap.
CHAPTER V
HOW A PIG LEARNED TO TALK
Snythergen dreamed that he was sitting on a pier, dangling his feet in the water. Little fishes were nibbling his toes, when suddenly a large one darted up and took a bite that hurt. Raising both feet quickly, he woke up.
“You don’t need to be so rough,” said the pig, who had been bowled over by the raising of Snythergen’s feet and lay on his back, waving his legs in the air.