“Well, maybe this will bring me good luck,” said Uncle Wiggily. “It doesn’t seem to be good for much else—such crooked money. A six-cent piece, I guess it was once. I’ll just put it in my pocket.”
So he did, and he walked along a little farther, until, coming to a place where a great, big tree had fallen to the ground, Uncle Wiggily heard some one sitting on it saying:
“Oh, dear! I’ve lost it! I can’t find it anywhere, and without it I don’t see how I can do what it says in the Mother Goose book I must do. It’s lost—gone!”
Uncle Wiggily looked and saw, sitting on the fallen tree, a very funny, but nice, old man. And the man was very crooked. He was bent and twisted until there was not a straight place on him, not even his nose, which was wobbled and bent over to one side, and his ears were folded together like pieces of paper.
“Well, well,” said Uncle Wiggily, feeling sorry for so crooked a man, “this is too bad. I wonder what happened to him to make him so bent, and I wonder what he has lost?” for the crooked, twisted man was turning his pockets inside out, and even his pockets were curled around like a corkscrew.
“Oh, such trouble as I am in!” cried the man. “Oh, dear!”
“Ha, trouble! That means here is a chance for me to help,” said the bunny uncle. “Excuse me,” he said, “but who are you, and can I do anything to help you?”
“Ha! Uncle Wiggily Longears! I know you by your pictures!” said the man. “Don’t you know me? I’m in the book that Mother Goose wrote. It says about me that once
“‘There was a crooked man,
Who walked a crooked mile,