“The jumping cow,” answered Mother Goose. “She’s gone!”
“I guess you mean the cow with the crumpled horn, don’t you?” asked the bunny uncle. “She’s the one, you know, that tossed the dog that worried the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt that lay in the House that Jack Built.”
“No, I don’t mean that cow,” answered Mother Goose. “I mean the jumping cow. She’s the worst cow for jumping you ever saw. She jumps over all the fences and stone walls and when we want her to give some milk for Little Tommie Tucker’s supper she isn’t to be found. I’ve looked everywhere for her, but I can’t find her. Oh, dear! Such trouble! I thought she might be here, in the House that Jack Built, with the Crumpled-Horn Cow. But she isn’t.”
“Ha! Just you leave it to me, if you please,” said Uncle Wiggily, kindly. “I’ll find the jumping cow for you. I can start off in my automobile, with the bologna sausage tires, that go faster when you sprinkle pepper on them or in my clothes-basket airship, with toy circus balloons on the handles.”
“You had better take your airship,” said Mother Goose. “A jumping cow would be found up in the air, I think.”
“I think so myself,” said Uncle Wiggily. So he hurried back to the hollow-stump bungalow and got out his airship. In that he sailed over the woods and fields, looking for the jumping cow.
“Do, please, ask her to hurry back,” said Mother Goose. “For she has all the milk for supper, and Tommie Tucker and the Children of the Old Woman who Lives in a Shoe, are so hungry they don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll get her,” promised Uncle Wiggily.
On and on he sailed in his airship. But he could not see the jumping cow. Up high he sailed and down low, and finally, when he came close to the ground, near the place where Sammie Littletail, the boy rabbit, lived with his sister Susie and his father and mother, Uncle Wiggily heard Jollie Longtail, the mouse boy, singing a song that went like this:
“Hi-diddle-diddle!