“To-night,” he said, “we will have a hedge-hog!”
Butterwops, who had stuck his head out of his crack to see what was going on, drew it back quickly and shuddered at this, for he knew what hedge-hogs were. His grandfather had been eaten by one in a garden close to the house, and he had heard they were terrible fellows for catching beetles, as indeed they are.
Sure enough, that night the master brought home a hedge-hog, a little prickly round ball in a basket. He unrolled himself by the fire and had a cup of milk.
“Let us call him Curlywig,” said the mistress, as she poured out the milk; “he is such a little darling. See him drink.”
So they called him Curlywig; but he paid no attention to them, and curled up on the rug and went to sleep.
That night Butterwops did not come down from the fireplace, but looked out from the wood pile in great trouble. When all his army of beetles were creeping and crawling over the floor, picking up food and having a rare good time, he kept shouting out from the edge of a log: “Do go home! Do go in! There’s a hedge-hog in the corner.”
But some of the beetles went close to Curlywig to look at him, and came back and said to Butterwops: “Nonsense, it’s only a mop-head. You are growing old and nervous, General. Go to bed and let us eat in peace.”
Almost as soon as they had spoken, Curlywig unrolled himself, and darting here and there and everywhere, went round the room cracking up beetles furiously while poor old Butterwops sat wringing his feelers and crying out from the wood pile: “I told you so! I told you so!”
From that time onwards, there was no peace for beetles. If one put his head up above a crack in the floor, Curlywig was on to him and he was snapped up. In three days, one hundred and four beetles had been eaten, and the rest were all starving. Butterwops himself had not tasted bite or sup all the time, and you could hear little Jimmy crying behind the skirting board that he had nothing to eat and was very hungry.
How long this might have gone on no one can say, but at last Butterwops hit on a bright idea, and the next night as soon as the people of the house were in bed, he came to the edge of the wood pile and said to the hedge-hog: “Mr. Curlywig, sir!”