“My dears, I don’t like to ask you to go out in the storm again, but I do wish you would run over to Grandfather Goosey-Gander’s house.  He is ill, and I want to send him some hot watercress tea.”

Now Alice didn’t want to go because her foot, that she once had cut on a stone, pained her.  And Jimmie, well, no sooner had he gotten in the house, and taken some bread and butter, with jam on it, than he had run out in the rain again, to play with Bully, the frog.  That left only Lulu to go to Grandfather Goosey-Gander’s house, but she said she didn’t mind in the least, and afterward she was very glad she went, for she saw a most wonderful sight.  Just you wait, and I’ll tell you about it.

So Mrs. Wibblewobble put the hot tea in a tin pan, and covered it over with a burdock leaf, to keep the rain out, and then she put some cold potatoes in a dish, for she thought the old gentleman duck might like them as well.  Then Lulu started off through the woods to go to her grandfather’s house.  It was still raining, but she didn’t mind, and pretty soon, oh, maybe in about ten quacks, she came to where Mr. Gander lived.

Well, you would have felt sorry for him if you could have seen him.  There he was, sitting on a stool, with his feet in a pail of hot water, and seven bottles of medicine on a table at his right wing, and six bottles of pills on a table at his left wing, and there was a blanket up around his neck, and he had a nightcap on, and he was groaning something terrible; yes, really he was.

“Oh, grandfather!” cried Lulu.  “Are you very sick?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I am very sick.  I think I have the pip, or maybe the epizoodic.”

“Which is worse?” asked Lulu, as she set the hot tea and the cold potatoes on the table.

“They are both worse,” answered the old gentleman duck.  “That is, they seem so, when you have them both at once.  But I think I would feel better if I had a hot cornmeal poultice on the back of my neck.  Only I can’t make it and put it there, for I can’t take my feet out of the hot water, and I don’t know where the cornmeal is, and I’m home all alone, for my wife has gone shopping.”

“Oh, I’ll make it for you,” said Lulu very kindly.  “I know where the cornmeal is.”  So she went to get some, and, on the way to the meal box she began to think: 

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if a blue fairy, or a green one or a purple one, or even a skilligimink colored one would appear now?  I would ask her to make grandfather better.  But I don’t s’pose one will come, for I never have any luck seeing fairies,” and she sighed three times as she opened the cornmeal box.

Then, all of a sudden, as she lifted the cover, as true as I’m telling you, if she didn’t see something all glittering and shining down in one corner of the box.  At first she thought it was the yellow meal, but then she saw that it was a little creature, all gold, with shimmering wings, like those of a humming bird.