“I’m glad you do,” spoke the fat man. “So you see how it is. I’m really quite vexed, which means just a little angry, and I’m in trouble, for the snipe bird did fly away with my pipe, and I can’t smoke, and I must do that, or it won’t be the way it is in the Mother Goose book. Do you think you can help me?”
“Well, I’ll try,” said Uncle Wiggily. “You just wait here until I run to my hollow-stump bungalow for my dancing slippers, and, when I come back I’ll see what I can do.”
Uncle Wiggily hurried on through the woods, found his dancing shoes, and was hurrying back, when, all of a sudden, he slipped and fell head over heels with his slippers, and a big sliver was stuck in his paw.
“Oh, dear!” cried the bunny uncle. “That sliver hurts very much! What shall I do? Now I am in trouble, for I can’t dance and I can’t help the fat man of Bombay. Oh, dear, what can I do?”
Uncle Wiggily couldn’t hop on with that sliver in his paw, and he couldn’t pull it out, try as he did.
“Help! Help!” he called, as loudly as he could. “Will no one help me, and the fat man of Bombay?”
“Ha! Who is that calling?” asked a voice. “And who knows about the fat man of Bombay?”
“I do,” answered the bunny uncle. “I am calling, and I know the Bombay fat man. He is in trouble, too.”
Then through the bushes came flying a bird called a snipe, and in his bill he carried a pipe.
“Oh, you have it!” cried Uncle Wiggily. “Why don’t you give it back to him so he won’t be sad and vexed any more? Why don’t you give back the pipe to the fat man of Bombay?”