t man has said and written that there are novels whose sole and
only use appears to be to attempt to relieve mankind of overflowing
tears--a kind of sponge, in fact, for sucking up feelings and emotions.
I remembered a few of these books. They had always appeared tempting to
the appetite, for they had been much read and were so greasy that they
must have absorbed no end of emotions in themselves.

"I retraced my steps to the library and literally devoured a whole
novel--that is, properly speaking, the interior, or soft part of it. The
crust, or binding, I left. When I had digested not only this, but a
second, I felt a stirring within me. I then ate a small piece of a third
romance and felt myself a poet. I said it to myself and told others the
same. I had headache and backache and I cannot tell what aches besides.
I thought over all the stories that may be said to be connected with
sausage pegs; and all that has ever been written about skewers, and
sticks, and staves, and splinters came to my thoughts--the ant-queen
must have had a wonderfully clear understanding. I remembered the man
who placed in his mouth a white stick, by which he could make himself
and the stick invisible. I thought of sticks as hobbyhorses, staves of
music or rime, of breaking a stick over a man's back, and of Heaven
knows how many more phrases of the same sort, relating to sticks,
staves, and skewers. All my thoughts ran on skewers, sticks of wood, and
staves. As I am at last a poet and have worked terribly hard to make
myself one, I can of course make poetry on anything. I shall therefore
be able to wait upon you every day in the week with a poetical history
of a skewer. And that is my soup."

"In that case," said the mouse-king, "we will hear what the third mouse
has to say."

"Squeak, squeak," cried a little mouse at the kitchen door. It was the
fourth, and not the third, of the four who were contending for the
prize, the one whom the rest supposed to be dead. She shot in like an
arrow and overturned the sausage peg that had been covered with crape.
She had been running day and night, for although she had traveled in a
baggage train, by railway, yet she had arrived almost too late. She
pressed forward, looking very much ruffled.

She had lost her sausage skewer but not her voice, and she began to
speak at once, as if they waited only for her and would hear her
only--as if nothing else in the world were of the least consequence.
She spoke o