o. Now I had these two things, imagination and
understanding, and through these I knew that the third was to be found
in the library; for a great man has said and written that there are
romances, whose sole and single use is that they relieve people of
their superfluous tears, and that they are, in fact, a sort of sponges
sucking up human emotion. I remembered a few of these old books which
had always looked especially palatable, and were much thumbed and very
greasy, having evidently absorbed a great deal of feeling into
themselves.

"I betook myself back to the library, and, so to speak, devoured a
whole novel--that is, the essence of it, the interior part, for I left
the crust or binding. When I had digested this, and a second one in
addition, I felt a stirring within me, and I ate a bit of a third
romance, and now I was a poet. I said so to myself, and told the
others also. I had headache, and chestache, and I can't tell what
aches besides. I began thinking what kind of stories could be made to
refer to a sausage-peg; and many pegs, and sticks, and staves, and
splinters came into my mind--the ant queen must have had a
particularly fine understanding. I remembered the man who took a white
stick in his mouth, by which means he could render himself and the
stick invisible; I thought of stick hobby-horses, of 'stock rhymes,'
of 'breaking the staff' over an offender, and Heaven knows of how many
phrases more concerning sticks, stocks, staves, and pegs. All my
thoughts ran upon sticks, staves, and pegs; and when one is a poet
(and I am a poet, for I have worked most terribly hard to become one)
a person can make poetry on these subjects. I shall therefore be able
to wait upon you every day with a poem or a history--and that's the
soup I have to offer."

"Let us hear what the third has to say," was now the Mouse King's
command.

"Peep! peep!" cried a small voice at the kitchen-door, and a little
mouse--it was the fourth of the mice who had contended for the prize,
the one whom they looked upon as dead--shot in like an arrow. She
toppled the sausage-peg with the crape covering over in a moment. She
had been running day and night, and had travelled on the railway, in
the goods train, having watched her opportunity, and yet she had
almost come too late. She pressed forward, looking very much rumpled,
and she had lost her sausage-peg, but not her voice, for she at once
took up the word, as if they had been waiting only for