"Then please let me go home," said Crackie. "I don't have to keep so quiet there and I can get something to eat. Toodle, Noodle, please take me home," and she got up out of her seat, and walked over to her brothers.
"Oh, Crackie!" cried the lady bug teacher, sadly like.
"You mustn't do that," said Professor Rat, and really he didn't know what to do himself. He had never had any one like Crackie in school before. And, really, she didn't mean to be bad. She just didn't know any better. It was her first day, you see.
"I want to talk, I'm hungry, I want to go home," said Crackie, as if that was all there was to it. She didn't see why she couldn't do just as she had been used to doing at home.
"Come on, Toodle and Noodle," she called. "School is no fun. I'm going home!"
Well, of course that upset everything. All the boy and girl animals laughed, and they couldn't study. The lady bug teacher, and Professor Rat himself, did not know what to do with Crackie. Mr. Rat was just thinking that perhaps he had better send one of her brothers home with Crackie when the little beaver girl, who was standing next to the window, cried out:
"Oh, the alligator! The bad, old skillery alligator! He is coming right in at the side door!"
And that was so. Crackie had gotten up just in time to see the alligator, and, only for her, maybe the bad creature would have gotten into the school before any one could stop him.
"Ha!" cried Professor Rat. "The skillery-scalery alligator, eh? I'll fix him! I'm glad you told me, Crackie."
Then the rat gentleman took two blackboard erasers in his paws. He clapped them together—the erasers, I mean—making a noise like a gun, and a lot of chalk dust that was on the erasers flew out, making it look just like smoke from a cannon, and when the 'gator saw this, and when he heard the bang-bang noise, he cried out: