At once the Hen started rolling out six yellow balls upon her pasteboard. These she wrapped up in a white crust and then hid them in the pockets of her skirts and sat upon them, while she made fourteen more eggs out of the white and yellow paste.
"The little hand must be to ask for six hard-boiled eggs," whispered Redy to Smaly.
At that moment Smaly, who was staring out of the window, nudged Redy, and looking out together they saw that the Wigs, who had been busily rebuilding the kitchen, had all fallen asleep in the market square because three o'clock was the hour of the afternoon's rest. The Confectioner, his hair streaming in the wind, was running hard towards his own house. He held by the hand Fritilla, the youngest of the Prisoner's daughters, whose big eyes were looking all about her as she ran. The Confectioner pushed her rapidly into his house and shut the door upon her, then he, too, fell asleep in the square like the other Wigs. This care which the Confectioner took of Fritilla was by no means unnecessary, as for several days she had been pursued by an enormous red Flying-Fish which declared that she had stolen from it its seven hundred and eighty-secondth feather. It declared that it had seen the plume actually in her hands, and that when it had gone home and counted its feathers over before going to sleep that night it only possessed seven hundred and eighty-one.
This Care which the Confectioner took of Fritilla was by no Means unnecessary
The smaller Flying-Fish now flew into the Historian's room, using its own little hole. It hated using this; but it seemed an even greater humiliation to use the big one, for that made the poor little Fish feel smaller than ever. Thus it came about that neither the big nor the little Flying-Fish ever used the larger hole, which had become all overgrown with delicate mosses and stonecrop, and even by a fine yellow wallflower. The windows in this country, if people did not look through them often enough, became almost opaque.
The Smaller Flying-Fish