nt your pilgrim's staff, so that when you return to
your home and enter the king's castle, you have only to touch the king
with your staff and violets will spring forth, even in the coldest
winter time. I think I have given you something worth carrying home, and
a little more than something.'"

Before the little mouse explained what this something more was, she
stretched her staff toward the king, and as it touched him the most
beautiful bunch of violets sprang forth and filled the place with their
perfume. The smell was so powerful that the mouse-king ordered the mice
who stood nearest the chimney to thrust their tails into the fire that
there might be a smell of burning, for the perfume of the violets was
overpowering and not the sort of scent that every one liked.

"But what was the something more, of which you spoke just now?" asked
the mouse-king.

"Why," answered the little mouse, "I think it is what they call
'effect.'" Thereupon she turned the staff round, and behold, not a
single flower was to be seen on it! She now held only the naked skewer,
and lifted it up as a conductor lifts his baton at a concert.

"Violets, the elf told me," continued the mouse, "are for the sight, the
smell, and the touch; so we have only to produce the effect of hearing
and tasting." Then, as the little mouse beat time with her staff, there
came sounds of music; not such music as was heard in the forest, at the
elfin feast, but such as is often heard in the kitchen--the sounds of
boiling and roasting. It came quite suddenly, like wind rushing through
the chimneys, and it seemed as if every pot and kettle were boiling
over.

The fire shovel clattered down on the brass fender, and then, quite as
suddenly, all was still,--nothing could be heard but the light, vapory
song of the teakettle, which was quite wonderful to hear, for no one
could rightly distinguish whether the kettle was just beginning to boil
or just going to stop. And the little pot steamed, and the great pot
simmered, but without any regard for each other; indeed, there seemed no
sense in the pots at all. As the little mouse waved her baton still more
wildly, the pots foamed and threw up bubbles and boiled over, while
again the wind roared and whistled through the chimney, and at last
there was such a terrible hubbub that the little mouse let her stick
fall.

"That is a strange sort of soup," said the mouse-king. "Shall we not now
hear about the preparation?"

"Tha