"Well, this is the first of my adventures since I went to sleep in the store and awakened in Herbert's house," thought the Monkey to himself, as he found that he was shut up inside the teacher's desk. "I wondered what Herbert was going to do with me when he slipped me under his coat at the breakfast table. Now I must see what we have here."
It was not very dark inside the drawer of the teacher's desk. Enough light came through the keyhole for the Monkey to see, and, among other things, he noticed a bottle of ink and a small Doll. He was pleased to see the Doll.
"Oh, here is a toy like myself!" said the Monkey, speaking in a whisper. "How do you do?" he went on, sitting up and bowing to his new acquaintance. "Are you any relation to the Sawdust Doll?" he asked politely.
"I'm a second or third cousin," was the answer. "She is stuffed with sawdust, but I am stuffed with cotton."
"Then I will call you Miss Cotton Doll," went on the Monkey. "What brought you here? Were you so bad in school that you had to be shut up in a desk?"
"No, not exactly. But a little girl named Mary brought me in her school bag yesterday, and she took me out in the study hour, and the teacher said it was wrong. So she took me away from the little girl named Mary."
"I thought Mary brought a lamb to school," said the Monkey on a Stick, who, having lived in a toy store, of course knew all about toy books and Mother Goose verses.
"That was another Mary," went on the Cotton Doll. "Besides Mary didn't bring the lamb to school, it followed her one day."
"Oh, so it did—I had forgotten," went on the Monkey.
"But my Mary brought me to school," said the Cotton Doll, "and her teacher took me away. She put me in this desk drawer; the teacher did."