And so that’s how it was that Curly did not go out with the other animal children when school was dismissed.  He had to stay in and clean off the blackboards, but he didn’t mind that much, and really he was sorry for being a little bit bad.

“You may go now,” said the owl school teacher, after a while, and Curly hurried home, feeling a little sad, and wondering what his mamma would say to him.  He also wanted to hurry and have some fun with his brother, Flop.

Well, as Curly was going through the woods, all of a sudden, under a tree, something fell and hit him on the nose.  He jumped to one side and exclaimed: 

“Who is throwing stones at me?”

But no one answered, and Curly went on.  Soon something else fell down, and hit him on the ear.

“I say!” he cried.  “Would you please stop that?  Is that the skillery-scalery alligator, or the fuzzy fox?”

But no one answered him, and Curly hurried on, thinking that perhaps bad fairies might be trying to have fun with him, or maybe turn him into a ham, or a piece of bacon, or something like that.

Well, he had not gone on much farther when, all at once, another something pattered down from a high tree, and struck him on the nose again.

“Oh, I say!” cried Curly, “please stop!” for this time it had been something sharp that hit him.  “That isn’t fair!” went on the little piggie boy.  “Who is throwing things at me?”

He looked down on the ground, and there he saw something like a rubber ball, only it was a sort of greenish brown color, and had stickers all over on it.  And then it burst open, and out rolled three little brown things.

“My word!” cried Curly, just like an English piggie boy.  “My word!  What is this?”

“Ha!  Ha!” laughed a voice behind him, and turning quickly around Curly saw Jacko Kinkytail, a hand organ monkey, hanging by his tail from a tree branch.  “Ha!  Ha!” laughed the monkey again.  “Don’t you know what those brown things on the ground are?”

“No indeed,” replied the piggie boy.  “What are they?”

“Chestnuts,” said Jacko the hand organ monkey.  “They are chestnuts, and they fell off the trees and hit you.  No one was throwing stones at you, though the prickly burrs inside of which the chestnuts are, seem as large as stones.”

“Chestnuts, eh?” spoke Curly.  “What good are they?”

“To eat,” answered the monkey.  “We will build a fire and roast some, and you will like them very much.”

“Goodie-oodie!” squealed Curly, and, as he and the monkey began to gather up the chestnuts, the piggie boy was rather glad, after all, that he had been kept in, though of course he was sorry that he had made the wrong picture in drawing class.

So while Curly gathered up the chestnuts, rooting them out from under the leaves with his nose, that was like a piece of rubber, and stamping them out of the prickly burrs with his sharp feet—­while he was doing this, I say, the monkey was making a fire to roast the nuts.