And well might he say so, for the chairs and tables were all scattered about, the carpets and rugs were piled in the middle of the floor, and the whole place seemed very much upset, indeed.
“Well, I suppose it’s always this way when house cleaning has to be done,” thought Uncle Wiggily, with a sigh. “I must put up with it.”
Then he stumbled over a stool, tripped on a chair, fell over a roll of carpet, and finally he reached his room, and sat down to read a book about how to make yellow carrots turn pink by coloring them with Easter eggs.
By and by after a while, Uncle Wiggily began to feel hungry.
“I wish I had something to eat,” he said, looking in the book at a large picture of a red, white and blue turnip, with a pink ribbon tied on it. “I wonder if supper is not nearly ready?”
Uncle Wiggily went to the door of his room and listened. He wanted to see if he could hear, down in the kitchen, the rattle of dishes and the clatter of the knives and forks. That would show Nurse Jane was setting the table, and when she set the table it was, nearly always, meal time.
But Uncle Wiggily could hear nothing but the moving and scraping of chairs about on the floor, and the flip-flop of the dusting cloth as Nurse Jane snapped it here and there, knocking the dust off the furniture upon the carpet, so she could not see it so plainly.
“Ha! Hum!” murmured Uncle Wiggily. “That doesn’t sound much like supper. I shall have to wait a bit longer.”
So he waited and waited, but there came no welcome sound of the rattle of dishes, nor the clatter of knives and forks. Nor was there any nice smell of ice cream frying on the stove, nor of peanuts boiling in the tea kettle. Nothing like supper at all.
“Well, this is very strange!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily, as he got up from his chair about the forty-’leventh time to listen if supper were ready. “Something must have happened to Nurse Jane. I’ll go look,” he said.