It was quite cold and there was some snow on the ground. Not as much as the time Neddie jumped into the big drift, but enough to make some snowballs. Neddie made a few in his paws, tossing them up into the air—the snowballs I mean he tossed, not his paws—and he caught the snowballs as they came down.
Pretty soon Neddie came to the baker’s, and he said:
“I want the largest lemon pie you have, if you please.”
“All right,” said Mr. Peetie Skeezex, the baker, “you shall have it. I have a specially fine large one.”
Then he brought out from the oven the loveliest lemon meringue pie Neddie had ever seen. It was almost as large around as a Christmas drum, and on top was a lot of that white fluffy stuff made from eggs, and it was browned just the least little bit, and sprinkled with powdered sugar, and around the edge was some sort of curly-cue stuff like twisted rope, and the pie was as pretty as one picture and part of another one.
“Oh, yum-yum!” cried Neddie when he saw the lemon pie. He could not help it, and he could hardly stop from taking a taste. But the baker knew what hungry bear boys might do to a lemon pie, so Mr. Peetie Skeezex put the lemon pie in a paper and tied it very tight.
“There you are, Neddie,” he said to the little bear boy. “There’s your pie. Hurry home with it.”
“I will,” answered Neddie. “We’re going to have it for supper. We’ve got company coming.”
“Fine!” said Mr. Skeezex, giving Neddie a sweet cake to keep him from getting too hungry on the way home with the pie. I guess the baker was afraid that maybe Neddie might bite the pie, just to see if it were real. But if Neddie had a sweet cake of his own to nibble on, this might not happen.
Neddie started for home, carrying the big lemon pie as carefully as the milkman brings in a bottle of cream for the cat, and the little boy bear was about half way to the cave-house, when, all of a sudden, while he was thinking how he could get two pieces of pie for supper, all at once out from behind a mulberry bush jumped an old sea lion.