“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 butter 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.