STORY VII

PIGGY BOYS AT SCHOOL

One day Curly, the little pig who had such a funny shaped tail, said
to his brother, Flop Ear:

"Say, let's run off and look for adventures as Uncle Wiggily, the
old gentleman rabbit, used to do!"

"Where shall we run?" asked Flop.

"Oh, almost anywhere," answered Curly. "We'll go down the road,
toward Sylvan Way, and out beyond the old black stump, and turn the
corner around the place where the apple tree grows, and then we'll
see what will happen."

"All right," agreed Flop, so the two little pig brothers started
off. Their mamma was making some red flannel pies in the kitchen,
ready for winter, and of course she did not see them go, or perhaps
she might have stopped them.

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___er 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
class.

"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 class 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 class." 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 class. 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 scraps.

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the teacher. "Such piggie boys I never saw!
They can't even be in the baby kindergarten class!"

"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 class
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 grass for the rag baby's hair ribbon, I'll
tell you about Curly being vaccinated.

See also:
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Howard R. Garis Curly and Floppy Twistytail the Funny Piggie Boys, Chapter 6: Flop and the Bag of Meal Lyrics
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