The Doctor started up in affected horror.  “Europe gone, did you say?  Bless me! what will become of us!”

“Don’t!” said the young lady, kicking petulantly with her dangling feet, and trying not to laugh.  “You know I mean the puzzles; and if they were yours, you wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t half like it as it is,” said the Doctor.  “I am seriously alarmed.  An earthquake is one thing; you have a good shaking, and settle down again.  But Europe gone—­lost—­Why, here comes Deordie, I declare, looking much more cheerful than we do; let us humbly hope that Europe has been found.  At present I feel like Aladdin when his palace had been transported by the magician; I don’t know where I am.”

“You’re here, Doctor; aren’t you?” asked the slow curly-wigged brother, squatting himself on the grass.

“Is Europe found?” said the Doctor tragically.

“Yes,” laughed Deordie.  “I found it.”

“You will be a great man,” said the Doctor.  “And—­it is only common charity to ask—­how about North America?”

“Found too,” said Deordie.  “But the Wash is completely lost.”

“And my six shirts in it!” said the Doctor.  “I sent them last Saturday as ever was.  What a world we live in!  Any more news?  Poor Tiny here has been crying her eyes out.”

“I’m so sorry, Tiny,” said the brother.  “But don’t bother about it.  It’s all square now, and we’re going to have a new shelf put up.”

“Have you found everything?” asked Tiny.

“Well, not the Wash, you know.  And the elephant and the guinea-pig are gone for good; so the other elephant and the other guinea-pig must walk together as a pair now.  Noah was among the soldiers, and we have put the cavalry into a night-light box.  Europe and North America were behind the book-case; and, would you believe it? the rocking-horse’s nose has turned up in the nursery oven.”

“I can’t believe it,” said the Doctor.  “The rocking-horse’s nose couldn’t turn up, it was the purest Grecian, modelled from the Elgin marbles.  Perhaps it was the heat that did it, though.  However, you seem to have got through your troubles very well, Master Deordie.  I wish poor Tiny were at the end of her task.”

“So do I,” said Deordie ruefully.  “But I tell you what I’ve been thinking, Doctor.  Nurse is always nagging at us, and we’re always in rows of one sort or another, for doing this, and not doing that, and leaving our things about.  But, you know, it’s a horrid shame, for there are plenty of servants, and I don’t see why we should be always bothering to do little things, and—­”

“Oh! come to the point, please,” said the Doctor; “you do go round the square so, in telling your stories, Deordie.  What have you been thinking of?”

“Well,” said Deordie, who was as good-tempered as he was slow, “the other day Nurse shut me up in the back nursery for borrowing her scissors and losing them; but I’d got ‘Grimm’ inside one of my knickerbockers, so when she locked the door, I sat down to read.  And I read the story of the Shoemaker and the little Elves who came and did his work for him before he got up; and I thought it would be so jolly if we had some little Elves to do things instead of us.”