"Oh dear!" said the great discoverer, rather impatiently. "Well, go ahead, Mr. Colburn, and write your book, while I go on a new voyage of discovery. Let us see which will finish first."
And now, seeing that the mice were settling down to their books in good earnest, I turned my attention to the nursery, where I rightly judged that I should find the three younger mice.
Well, to be sure, what fine sport they were having, those three little things! they had evidently been washing the dolls' clothes, for small clothes-lines of string were all about the room, and Downy's pinafore looked as if it had been in the tub: but now the wash was all hung out, and the mice were "playing wind," as they called it: that is to say, they were running to and fro, puffing out their little fat cheeks, and blowing at the clothes with might and main, in the hope of making them dry sooner.
"I am the North Wind!" said Puff. "Whoop! whoop!"
"I am the South Wind!" cried Fluff.
"And I'm some kind of wind, ivn't I?" asked Downy, who was blowing as hard as any of them.
"Yes, dear, you are the West Wind; whoop! whoop! whoop!" said Puff, as she pranced about.
Now presently the door opened, and Mrs. Posset came in, with her basket of stockings to mend. One of the clothes-lines was directly in her way, and the good woman stumbled over it, and knocked her head against the mantel-piece and dropped all the stockings. This she did not like, as you may imagine. "Dear me! children," she cried, "it's as much as my life is worth to enter this nursery, with all your crinkum-crankums! my stars! will you look at the strings now, all over the room, fit to break a body's neck! Whatever are you doing now, Miss Puff?"
"We washed the dolls' clothes, Possy dear," said Puff, "because they were dirty, and you said this morning dirt was a sin."