“Give Bo Peep some of your toy woolly sheep, if you please,” said Uncle Wiggily to the toy-store man. “She can take them home with her, while her own sheep are safe in some warm place, I’m sure. But now she must have some sort of sheep to take home with her in place of the lost ones, so it will come out all right, as it is in the book. And these toy woolly sheep will do as well as any; won’t they, Little Bo Peep?”
“Oh, yes, they will; thank you very much, Uncle Wiggily,” answered Bo Peep, making a pretty little bow. Then the rabbit gentleman bought her ten little toy, woolly sheep, each one with a tail which Bo Peep could wag for them, and one toy lamb went: “Baa! Baa! Baa!” as real as anything, having a little phonograph talking machine inside him.
“Now I can go home to Mother Goose and make believe these are my lost sheep,” said Bo Peep, “and it will be all right.”
“And here is a piece of chocolate for you to eat,” said Uncle Wiggily. Then Bo Peep hurried home with her fleecy toy sheep, and, later on, she found her real ones, all nice and warm, in the barn where the Cow with the Crumpled Horn lived. Mother Goose laughed in her jolliest way when she saw the toy sheep Uncle Wiggily had bought Bo Peep.
“It’s just like him!” said Mother Goose.
And if the goldfish doesn’t climb out of his tank and hide in the sardine tin, where the stuffed olives can’t find him, I’ll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and Tommie Tucker.
CHAPTER VIII
UNCLE WIGGILY AND TOMMIE TUCKER
“Oh, Uncle Wiggily!” called Susie Littletail, the rabbit girl, one day, as she went over to see her bunny uncle in his hollow-stump bungalow. “Oh, Uncle Wiggily! Isn’t it too bad?”
“Isn’t what too bad?” asked the old gentleman rabbit, as he scratched his nose with his left ear, and put his glasses in his pocket, for he was tired of reading the paper, and felt like going out for a walk.