Pretty soon, in a little while, oh, maybe in about an hour and a half, Curly and Flop came to a building all made of red brick, with a chimney sticking from the top for the smoke to come out of, and a lot of doors and windows in it.
"I wonder what that is?" said Flop.
"Maybe it"s where the skillery scalery alligator lives," suggested Curly.
"Oh, no, he lives in a rocky cave under the water," spoke Flop.
"This isn"t his house."
"Then it"s where the bad fox lives," went on Curly as he put his nose down in the dirt to see if he could find any hickory nuts there.
"No, the fox lives in a stump," said Flop. "I don"t know what this place can be."
And then, all of a sudden, before you could take a brush and paint a picture of a lion on a soda cracker, all of a sudden the piggie boys heard a lot of voices singing a song like this:
"We are little children, To school we love to go; We run along, And sing a song, In rain or hail or snow."
"Oh, ho!" exclaimed Curly. "That"s a school, that"s what it is."
"To be sure," agreed his brother. "Let"s go in and learn our A B C"s and then we can go home and tell mamma all about it. This is an adventure, all right."
"I believe it is," said Curly. So the two little piggy boys walked along through the front door of the school, right into the room where the nice lady bug teacher was telling the children how to make a straight line crooked by bending it, and how to put b.u.t.ter on their bread, by spreading it.
"Oh, my!" exclaimed a little rabbit girl, as she saw the two piggie boys in school. "Look at that!"
"Quiet! No talking!" said the lady bug teacher.
"Oh, but this is like Mary"s little lamb, only it"s different," said Jonny Bushytail, the squirrel boy, as he remembered the verse about the lamb in school. Only this time it was pigs.
And, all this while Curly and Flop just stood there, in the school room looking about them and wondering what they had better do. For they had never been to school before; not even in the kindergarten cla.s.s.
"This is a funny place," said Flop.
"Isn"t it?" agreed Curly. "They all seem quite surprised to see us."
"They do, indeed," agreed Flop and, as a matter of fact, all the animal children in the school were laughing. But the teacher--she didn"t laugh. Instead, she said:
"Quiet, if you please! Fold your paws, everybody! Now, that the little pigs have come to school we must see how much they know, so we can tell what cla.s.s to put them in." So she said to Curly:
"Spell cat:"
"D-o-g," spelled the little pig boy.
"Wrong," said the teacher. "I guess you will have to go in the kindergarten cla.s.s." Then she said to Flop Ear; "Spell boy."
"G-i-r-l," spelled Flop.
"Wrong," said the teacher. "You, too, will have to go in the kindergarten cla.s.s. Now, I wonder if either of you piggy boys can make a paper bird in a cage."
So she gave each of them a pair of scissors and some red paper, and blue and pink and yellow and brown and all colors like that. But my goodness sakes alive and some candy with cocoanut on the top! Curly and Flop had never learned to cut things out of paper, and of course they did not know how. They just cut and slashed and didn"t make anything but scrips and sc.r.a.ps.
"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the teacher. "Such piggie boys I never saw!
They can"t even be in the baby kindergarten cla.s.s!"
"Maybe they can do something," said Susie Littletail"s new baby sister. "Some trick or anything like that."
"Of course we can!" cried Curly, who was ashamed that his brother and himself could do nothing the teacher asked. "Just watch us!" he cried.
So he stood up on the end of his tail and spun around like a top, and then he made a squealing noise like a horn and played a tune called "Ham and Eggs are Very Fine, but Ice Cream Cones are Better."
Then Flop turned a somersault and stood on one leg, and then the two piggie boys danced up and down together like leaves falling off a tree.
"Oh! those little fellows are smarter than I thought they were,"
said the lady bug teacher. "I guess they can be in our first cla.s.s after all."
And just then a great big, bad, black bear rushed into the schoolroom, and he was going to grab up about forty-"leven of the animal children.
But Curly suddenly shouted:
"Here, you scoot away from us or I"ll make a bee sting you on the nose!" and as the bear was very much afraid of being stung on the end of his soft and tender nose, he ran away as fast as he could and stayed in his den, eating postage stamps for nearly a week, and didn"t bother anybody.
Then the teacher and all the animal children thought the piggie boys were very clever indeed, and the lady bug invited them to come to school whenever they wanted to. And Curly and Flop said they would come.
Then they ran home to dinner and that"s all there is to this story.
But on the next page, in case the little girl with brown eyes doesn"t cut all the green gra.s.s for the rag baby"s hair ribbon, I"ll tell you about Curly being vaccinated.
STORY VIII
CURLY IS VACCINATED
About two days, or maybe three days and part of another one, after Curly Twistytail and his brother, Flop, had run away to school and had performed their funny tricks, as I told you in the story before this one, something else happened. And this is the way it was:
Curly was out in the yard in front of the piggy house one morning, raking up the leaves and thinking what fun he would have making a fire and roasting some ears of corn, when he heard his mamma calling:
"Oh, boys! Where are you?"
"Here I am," answered Curly as he jumped over a pile of leaves and fell into the middle of them. But it did not hurt him, as they were so nice and soft.
"And here I am, too!" exclaimed Flop, and the other little piggie boy, who was up in a hammock, swinging with one of the Katy Dids, jumped down and ran to the back kitchen door.
"What is it, mother?" called both the little piggie boys together.
"I want one of you to go to the store for me," she said, "I need some chocolate to put on top of a cake."
"Oh, I"ll go!" exclaimed Floppy and Curly together, quickly, and you could not tell which one spoke first. But Mrs. Twistytail said:
"Well, I think I"ll let Floppy go, and when he comes back I"ll give you each some of the cake."