“Be careful, please! Look out! Kindly wipe your feet!” cried Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, as Uncle Wiggily Longears, the rabbit gentleman, was going into his hollow stump bungalow one day, after he had been out riding in his airship.
“Why, what is the matter?” asked Uncle Wiggily. “Don’t I always wipe my feet, Nurse Jane?” and this time the rabbit gentleman was very particular to give them an extra polish, or two, on the door-mat before entering.
“Oh, yes! as a rule you are very good that way,” said Nurse Jane politely, as she looked at her tail to see if Sammie Littletail, the boy rabbit, had tied any knots in it for a joke. But he had not, I am glad to say.
“Yes, as a rule, you are very careful,” went on Nurse Jane, “but you see I am house cleaning, and I have just scrubbed the floors, and so I don’t want a speck of dirt on them.”
“Ah, ha! I see! House cleaning!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily. “Well, I suppose it has to be done once in a while, but I do not like it at all. I think I will go to my room and read, and when supper is ready, call me, please.”
“I will,” promised Nurse Jane, and then she went on looking for moth-millers, which eat up your clothes, and she hunted for dust in all the corners, Nurse Jane did, and she swept and cleaned, and she had a great old time, she did!
“My, this is awful!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily, as he went inside the hollow stump bungalow. “Why, there is hardly room to move!”
And well might he say so, for the chairs and tables were all scattered about, the carpets and rugs were piled in the middle of the floor, and the whole place seemed very much upset, indeed.
“Well, I suppose it’s always this way when house cleaning has to be done,” thought Uncle Wiggily, with a sigh. “I must put up with it.”
Then he stumbled over a stool, tripped on a chair, fell over a roll of carpet, and finally he reached his room, and sat down to read a book about how to make yellow carrots turn pink by coloring them with Easter eggs.
By and by after a while, Uncle Wiggily began to feel hungry.
“I wish I had something to eat,” he said, looking in the book at a large picture of a red, white and blue turnip, with a pink ribbon tied on it. “I wonder if supper is not nearly ready?”
Uncle Wiggily went to the door of his room and listened. He wanted to see if he could hear, down in the kitchen, the rattle of dishes and the clatter of the knives and forks. That would show Nurse Jane was setting the table, and when she set the table it was, nearly always, meal time.
But Uncle Wiggily could hear nothing but the moving and scraping of chairs about on the floor, and the flip-flop of the dusting cloth as Nurse Jane snapped it here and there, knocking the dust off the furniture upon the carpet, so she could not see it so plainly.
“Ha! Hum!” murmured Uncle Wiggily. “That doesn’t sound much like supper. I shall have to wait a bit longer.”
So he waited and waited, but there came no welcome sound of the rattle of dishes, nor the clatter of knives and forks. Nor was there any nice smell of ice cream frying on the stove, nor of peanuts boiling in the tea kettle. Nothing like supper at all.
“Well, this is very strange!” exclaimed Uncle Wiggily, as he got up from his chair about the forty-’leventh time to listen if supper were ready. “Something must have happened to Nurse Jane. I’ll go look,” he said.
Putting aside his book, down stairs the rabbit gentleman went, and he saw the muskrat lady in the yard, stretching a dusty carpet out on the green grass.
“Ahem! Excuse me, Nurse Jane,” said Uncle Wiggily, “but may I ask when tea will be ready?” You see he said tea to be more polite like.
“Tea!” exclaimed Nurse Jane. “Why, I can not give you your supper, Wiggy, until I have beaten all the dust out of this dusty carpet. And it will take me some time, Wiggy.” You see she called him Wiggy for short, because she was very busy at house cleaning.
“No supper until that carpet is beaten?” cried Uncle Wiggily, sad and disappointed like.
“No, indeed,” answered Nurse Jane. Then, with her long tail, which was like a carpet beater stick, the muskrat lady began to whip the dust out of the dusty carpet to make it clean.
“Oh, my! That is going to take a long time!” thought the rabbit gentleman. “I shall be very hungry indeed before I get any supper this evening, if I can’t get it until that carpet is beaten.”
So he waited and waited, and Nurse Jane kept on beating the dusty carpet with her long tail, and Uncle Wiggily was getting more and more hungry, when, all of a sudden, he heard some voices shouting:
“That’s the way to run! Throw the ball! Slide to home base! Put him out! Over the fence! Hurray! A home run!”
“Ha! Animal boys playing ball!” cried Uncle Wiggily. “I have an idea! I’ll give them five cents each, and get them to beat the dusty carpet with the baseball bats! Then Nurse Jane will not have to do it and can get supper for me!”
Out he went to the vacant lot where the animal boys were playing ball. Charlie, the chicken chap, was at the bat.
“Boys, will you beat a dusty carpet for Nurse Jane?” asked Uncle Wiggily. “I would do it myself, only my rheumatism is so bad that I can’t!”
“Surely, we will beat it!” cried Jimmie Wibblewobble, the duck. So the animal boys soon beat the dusty carpet with their baseball bats, and Uncle Wiggily gave them five cents each for ice cream cones.
And, shortly after that, Nurse Jane made ready the rabbit gentleman’s supper, and everybody was happy, and when the carpet was no longer dusty, house cleaning time was over, and Uncle Wiggily could live in peace and quietness and he was glad.
