"Let those mice in my window? Never!" cried Mr. Capper. "Why should I do a thing like that?"
"I thought maybe it was for an advertisement—to attract customers to your store," said Mr. Martin. "Though I thought it was rather funny."
"It is too funny!" cried the baker. "All my buns are spoiled, and I just baked them. As for customers—I have a crowd, yes, but they will not buy what the mice have nibbled.
"Whose mice are they? Whose white rats are they? I ask you that!" cried the baker, who was much excited. "A little while ago two boys come in to buy cookies. I wait on them, and I go back to my oven. Then the next I know I see a crowd and I come out to find—these!"
He pointed to the white rats and mice that were having a fine time among the buns in the bakeshop window.
"You say two boys were here a little while ago?" asked Mr. Martin, and he began to have a suspicion of what had happened.
"Two boys," replied the baker. "They have a box with them—Ha! here is the box now. It is the cage that the mice got out of!" he cried, pointing to a box with a wire front on the floor of the store, in a corner.
"Uncle Toby's box!" exclaimed Mr. Martin, in a low voice.
"What's that?" cried the baker. "You know these white rats and mice, Mr. Martin?"
"I'm afraid I do," said the father of the Curlytops. "My children got some new pets from an uncle of mine—Uncle Toby. Among the pets were white mice and rats. That is the box we brought them in from Pocono. But how did the box get here?"