“Oh, dear, I hope nothing will hurt them—they were so cunning,” mourned Chicken Little. She hunted them up the minute she got home. The tiny heap of paper was where they had left it, but the mice were gone. Olga and Mrs. Morton denied having seen them.
Ernest and Jane hunted the room over, but the mice had disappeared.
When they fed Pete that night he seemed droopy and turned up his nose at his best beloved dainties.
“Has Pete been loose today?” asked Dr. Morton.
“Yes, but I don’t think he went out of the front room upstairs,” replied Mrs. Morton.
“Well, I’d be willing to wager Pete knows what became of the baby mice,” laughed the doctor. “Trim him up with flowers, Chicken, and he’ll make a nice green grave for the dear departed.”
A few days later Jane and Gertie were playing paper dolls in one of the window recesses upstairs and remembering the mice decided to have a doll funeral. But a funeral required mourning and they couldn’t find a scrap of black paper. While they were rummaging, they came across their find of old newspapers, which Mrs. Morton had stacked up on a table till Dr. Morton found time to look them over. Jane noticed that some of them had heavy black bands across the front page.
“Say, they’d be fine—we could paste them close together on white paper for the dresses and veils.”
She started off to ask her mother’s permission to use them.
“Why, I don’t know whether your father wants any of them or not. He spoke as if he would like to save a few—you might take the ones the mice nibbled.”