ll out, and they confessed that the business
they had come on was to take away a few thousand gold coins of the
realm which I was known to have in the house locked in a steel chest.

"I bought Wriggletto a handsome silver collar after that, and it was
generally understood that he was the guardian of my place, and robbers
bothered me no more. Then he was finer than a cat for rats. On very
hot days he would go off into the cellar, where it was cool, and lie
there with his mouth wide open and his eyes shut, and catch rats by
the dozens. They'd run around in the dark, and the first thing they'd
know they'd stumble into Wriggletto's mouth; and he swallowed them and
licked his chops afterwards, just as you or I do when we've swallowed
a fine luscious oyster or a clam.

"But pleasantest of all the things Wriggletto did for me--and he was
untiring in his attentions in that way--was keeping me cool on hot
summer nights. Para as you may have heard is a pretty hot place at
best, lying in a tropical region as it does, but sometimes it is awful
for a man used to the Northern climate, as I was. The act of fanning
one's self, so far from cooling one off, makes one hotter than ever.
Maybe you remember how it was with the elephant in the poem:

"'Oh my, oh dear!' the elephant said,
'It is so awful hot!
I've fanned myself for seventy weeks,
And haven't cooled a jot.'

"And that was the way it was with me in Para on hot nights. I'd fan
and fan and fan, but I couldn't get cool until Wriggletto became a
member of my family, and then I was all right. He used to wind his
tail about a huge palm-leaf fan I had cut in the forest, so large that
I couldn't possibly handle it myself, and he'd wave it to and fro by
the hour, with the result that my house was always the breeziest place
in Para."

"Where is Wriggletto now?" asked Diavolo.

"Heigho!" sighed Mr. Munchausen. "He died, poor fellow, and all
because of that silver collar I gave him. He tried to swallow a jibola
that entered my house one night on wickedness intent, and while
Wriggletto's throat was large enough when he stretched it to take down
three jibolas, with a collar on which wouldn't stretch he couldn't
swallow one. He didn't know that, unfortunately, and he kept on trying
until the jibola got a quarter way down and then he stuck. Each
swallow, of course, made the collar fit more tightly and finally poor
Wriggletto choked himself to death. I felt so badly about it