Mrs Twit looked down at her feet and by golly the man was right. Her feet were not touching the ground.
Mr Twit, you see, had been just as clever with the chair as he'd been with the walking-stick. Every night when he had gone downstairs and stuck a little bit extra on to the stick, he had done the same to the four legs of Mrs Twit's chair.
'Just look at you sitting there in your same old chair,' he cried, 'and you've shrunk so much your feet are dangling in the air!'
Mrs Twit went white with fear.
'You've got the shrinks!' cried Mr Twit, pointing his finger at her like a pistol. 'You've got them badly! You've got the most terrible case of shrinks I've ever seen!'
Mrs Twit became so frightened she began to dribble. But Mr Twit, still remembering the worms in his spaghetti, didn't feel sorry for her at all. 'I suppose you know what happens to you when you get the shrinks?' he said.
'What?' gasped Mrs Twit. 'What happens?'
'Your head SHRINKS into your neck...
'And your neck SHRINKS into your body...
'And your body SHRINKS into your legs...
And your legs SHRINK into your feet. And in the end there's nothing left except a pair of shoes and a bundle of old clothes.'
'I can't bear it!' cried Mrs Twit.
'It's a terrible disease,' said Mr Twit. 'The worst in the world.'
'How long have I got?' cried Mrs Twit. 'How long before I finish up as a bundle of old clothes and a pair of shoes?'
Mr Twit put on a very solemn face. At the rate you're going,' he said, shaking his head sadly 'I'd say not more than ten or eleven days.'
'But isn't there anything we can do?' cried Mrs Twit.
'There's only one cure for the shrinks,' said Mr Twit.
'Tell me!' she cried. 'Oh, tell me quickly!'
'We'll have to hurry!' said Mr Twit.
'I'm ready. I'll hurry! I'll do anything you say!' cried Mrs Twit.
'You won't last long if you don't,' said Mr Twit, giving her another grizzly grin.
'What is it I must do?' cried Mrs Twit, clutching her cheeks.
'You've got to be stretched,' said Mr Twit.
Mrs Twit Gets a Stretching
Mr Twit led Mrs Twit outdoors where he had everything ready for the great stretching.
He had one hundred balloons and lots of string.
He had a gas cylinder for filling the balloons.
He had fixed an iron ring into the ground.
'Stand here,' he said, pointing to the iron ring. He then tied Mrs Twit's ankles to the iron ring.
When that was done, he began filling the balloons with gas. Each balloon was on a long string and when it was filled with gas it pulled on its string, trying to go up and up. Mr Twit tied the ends of the strings to the top half of Mrs Twit's body. Some he tied round her neck, some under her arms, some to her wrists and some even to her hair.
Soon there were fifty coloured balloons floating in the air above Mrs Twit's head.
'Can you feel them stretching you?' asked Mr Twit.
'I can! I can!' cried Mrs Twit. 'They're stretching me like mad.'
He put on another ten balloons. The upward pull became very strong.
Mrs Twit was quite helpless now. With her feet
tied to the ground and her arms pulled upwards by the balloons, she was unable to move. She was a prisoner, and Mr Twit had intended to go away and leave her like that for a couple of days and nights to teach her a lesson. In fact, he was just about to leave when Mrs Twit opened her big mouth and said something silly.
'Are you sure my feet are tied properly to the ground?' she gasped. 'If those strings around my ankles break, it'll be goodbye for me!'
And that's what gave Mr Twit his second nasty idea.
Mrs Twit Goes Ballooning Up
'There's enough pull here to take me to the moon!' Mrs Twit cried out.
'To take you to the moon!' exclaimed Mr Twit. 'What a ghastly thought! We wouldn't want anything like that to happen, oh dear me no!'
'We most certainly wouldn't!' cried Mrs Twit. 'Put some more string around my ankles quickly! I want to feel absolutely safe!'
'Very well, my angel,' said Mr Twit, and with a
ghoulish grin on his lips he knelt down at her feet. He took a knife from his pocket and with one quick slash he cut through the strings holding Mrs Twit's ankles to the iron ring.
She went up like a rocket.
'Help!' she screamed. 'Save me!'
But there was no saving her now. In a few seconds she was high up in the blue sky and climbing fast.
Mr Twit stood below looking up. ' What a pretty sight!' he said to himself. 'How lovely all those balloons look in the sky! And what a marvellous bit of luck for me! At last the old hag is lost and gone for ever.'
Mrs Twit Comes Ballooning Down
Mrs Twit may have been ugly and she may have been beastly, but she was not stupid.
High up there in the sky, she had a bright idea. 'If I can get rid of some of these balloons,' she said to herself, 'I will stop going up and start to come down.'
She began biting through the strings that held the balloons to her wrists and arms and neck and hair. Each time she bit through a string and let the balloon float away, the upward pull got less and her rate of climb slowed down.
When she had bitten through twenty strings, she stopped going up altogether. She stayed still in the air.
She bit through one more string.
Very, very slowly, she began to float downwards.
It was a calm day. There was no wind at all. And because of this, Mrs Twit had gone absolutely straight up. She now began to come absolutely straight down.
As she floated gently down, Mrs Twit's petticoat billowed out like a parachute, showing her long knickers. It was a grand sight on a glorious day, and thousands of birds came flying in from miles around to stare at this extraordinary old woman in the sky.
Mr Twit Gets a Horrid Shock
Mr Twit, who thought he had seen his ugly wife for the last time, was sitting in the garden celebrating with a mug of beer.
Silently, Mrs Twit came floating down. When she was about the height of the house above Mr Twit, she suddenly called out at the top of her voice, 'Here I come, you grizzly old grunion! You rotten old turnip! You filthy old frumpet!'
Mr Twit jumped as though he'd been stung by a giant wasp. He dropped his beer. He looked up. He gaped. He gasped. He gurgled. A few choking sounds came out of his mouth. 'Ughhhhhhhh!' he said. 'Arghhhhhhhh! Ouchhhhhhhh!'
'I'll get you for this!' shouted Mrs Twit. She was floating down right on top of him. She was purple with rage and slashing the air with her long walking-stick which she had somehow managed to hang on to all the time. 'I'll swish you to a swazzle!' she shouted. 'I'll swash you to a swizzle! I'll gnash you to a gnozzle! I'll gnosh you to a gnazzle!' And before Mr Twit had time to run away, this bundle of balloons and petticoats and fiery fury landed right on top of him, lashing out with the stick and cracking him all over his body.
The House, the Tree and the Monkey Cage
But that's enough of that. We can't go on forever watching these two disgusting people doing disgusting things to each other. We must get ahead with the story.
Here is a picture of Mr and Mrs Twit's house and garden. Some house! It looks like a prison. And not a window anywhere.
'Who wants windows?' Mr Twit had said when they were building it. 'Who wants every Tom, Dick and Harry peeping in to see what you're doing?' It didn't occur to Mr Twit that windows were meant mainly for looking out of, not for looking into.
And what do you think of that ghastly garden? Mrs Twit was the gardener. She was very good at growing thistles and stinging-nettles. 'I always grow plenty of spiky thistles and plenty of stinging-nettles,' she used to say. 'They keep out nasty nosey little children.'
Near the house you can see Mr Twit's work-shed.
To one side there is The Big Dead Tree. It never has any leaves on it because it's dead.
r /> And not far from the tree, you can see the monkey cage. There are four monkeys in it. They belong to Mr Twit. You will hear about them later.
Hugtight Sticky Glue
Once a week, on Wednesdays, the Twits had Bird Pie for supper. Mr Twit caught the birds and Mrs Twit cooked them.
Mr Twit was good at catching birds. On the day before Bird Pie day, he would put the ladder up against The Big Dead Tree and climb into the branches with a bucket of glue and a paint-brush. The glue he used was something called HUGTIGHT and it was stickier than any other glue in the world. He would paint it along the tops of all the branches and then go away.
As the sun went down, birds would fly in from all around to roost for the night in The Big Dead Tree. They didn't know, poor things, that the branches were all smeared with horrible HUGTIGHT. The moment they landed on a branch, their feet stuck and that was that.
The next morning, which was Bird Pie day, Mr Twit would climb up the ladder again and grab all the wretched birds that were stuck to the tree. It didn't matter what kind they were - song thrushes, blackbirds, sparrows, crows, little jenny wrens, robins, anything - they all went into the pot for Wednesday's Bird Pie supper.
Four Sticky Little Boys
On one Tuesday evening after Mr Twit had been up the ladder and smeared the tree with HUGTIGHT, four little boys crept into the garden to look at the monkeys. They didn't care about the thistles and stinging-nettles, not when there were monkeys to look at. After a while, they got tired of looking at the monkeys, so they explored further into the garden and found the ladder leaning against The Big Dead Tree. They decided to climb up it just for fun.
There's nothing wrong with that.
The next morning, when Mr Twit went out to collect the birds, he found four miserable little boys sitting in the tree, stuck as tight as could be by the seats of their pants to the branches. There were no birds because the presence of the boys had scared them away.
Mr Twit was furious. 'As there are no birds for my pie tonight,' he shouted, 'then it'll have to be boys instead!' He started to climb the ladder. 'Boy Pie might be better than Bird Pie,' he went on, grinning horribly. 'More meat and not so many tiny little bones!'
The boys were terrified. 'He's going to boil us!' cried one of them.
'He'll stew us alive!' wailed the second one.
'He'll cook us with carrots!' cried the third.
But the fourth little boy, who had more sense than the others, whispered, 'Listen, I've just had an idea. We are only stuck by the seats of our pants. So quick! Unbutton your pants and slip out of them and fall to the ground.'
Mr Twit had reached the top of the ladder and was just about to make a grab for the nearest boy when they all suddenly tumbled out of the tree and ran for home with their naked bottoms winking at the sun.
The Great Upside Down Monkey Circus
Now for the monkeys.
The four monkeys in the cage in the garden were all one family. They were Muggle-Wump and his wife and their two small children.
But what on earth were Mr and Mrs Twit doing with monkeys in their garden?
Well, in the old days, they had both worked in a circus as monkey trainers. They used to teach monkeys to do tricks and to dress up in human clothes and to smoke pipes and all the rest of that nonsense.
Today, although they were retired, Mr Twit still wanted to train monkeys. It was his dream that one day he would own the first GREAT UPSIDE DOWN MONKEY CIRCUS in the world.
That meant that the monkeys had to do everything upside down. They had to dance upside down (on their hands with their feet in the air). They had to play football upside down. They had to balance one on top of the other upside down, with Muggle-Wump at the bottom and the smallest baby monkey at the very top. They even had to eat and drink upside down and that is not an easy thing to do because the food and water has to go up your throat instead of down it. In fact, it is almost impossible, but the monkeys simply had to do it otherwise they got nothing.
All this sounds pretty silly to you and me. It sounded pretty silly to the monkeys, too. They absolutely hated having to do this upside down nonsense day after day. It made them giddy standing on their heads for hours on end. Sometimes the two small monkey children would faint with so much blood going to their heads. But Mr Twit didn't care about that. He kept them practising for six hours every day and if they didn't do as they were told, Mrs Twit would soon come running with her beastly stick.
The Roly-Poly Bird to the Rescue
Muggle-Wump and his family longed to escape from the cage in Mr Twit's garden and go back to the African jungle where they came from.
They hated Mr and Mrs Twit for making their lives so miserable.
They also hated them for what they did to the birds every Tuesday and Wednesday. 'Fly away, birds!' they used to shout, jumping about in the cage and waving their arms. 'Don't sit on that Big Dead Tree! It's just been smeared all over with sticky glue! Go and sit somewhere else!'
But these were English birds and they couldn't understand the weird African language the monkeys spoke. So they took no notice and went on using The Big Dead Tree and getting caught for Mrs Twit's Bird Pie.
Then one day, a truly magnificent bird flew down out of the sky and landed on the monkey cage.
'Good heavens!' cried all the monkeys together. 'It's the Roly-Poly Bird! What on earth are you doing over here in England, Roly-Poly Bird?' Like the monkeys, the Roly-Poly Bird came from Africa and he spoke the same language as they did.
'I've come for a holiday,' said the Roly-Poly Bird. 'I like to travel.' He fluffed his marvellous coloured feathers and looked down rather grandly at the monkeys. 'For most people,' he went on, 'flying away on holiday is very expensive, but I can fly anywhere in the world for nothing.'
'Do you know how to talk to these English birds?' Muggle-Wump asked him.
'Of course I do,' said the Roly-Poly Bird. 'It's no good going to a country and not knowing the language.'
'Then we must hurry,' said Muggle-Wump. 'Today is Tuesday and over there you can already see the revolting Mr Twit up the ladder painting sticky glue on all the branches of The Big Dead Tree. This evening when the birds come in to roost, you must warn them not to perch on that tree or they will be made into Bird Pie.'
That evening, the Roly-Poly Bird flew round and round The Big Dead Tree singing out,
'There's sticky stick stuff all over the tree!
If you land in the branches, you'll never get free!
So fly away! Fly away! Stay up high!
Or you'll finish up tomorrow in a hot Bird Pie!'
No Bird Pie for Mr Twit
The next morning when Mr Twit came out with his huge basket to snatch all the birds from The Big Dead Tree, there wasn't a single one on it. They were all sitting on top of the monkey cage. The Roly-Poly Bird was there as well, and Muggle-Wump and his family were inside the cage and the whole lot of them were laughing at Mr Twit.
Still No Bird Pie for Mr Twit
Mr Twit wasn't going to wait another week for his Bird Pie supper. He loved Bird Pie. It was his favourite meal. So that very same day, he went after the birds again. This time he smeared all the top bars of the monkey cage with sticky glue, as well as the branches of The Big Dead Tree. 'Now I'll get you,' he said, 'whichever one you sit on!'
The monkeys crouched inside the cage watching all this, and later on, when the Roly-Poly Bird came swooping in for an evening chat, they shouted out, 'Don't land on our cage, Roly-Poly Bird! It's covered in sticky glue! So is the tree!'
And that evening, as the sun went down and all the birds came in again to roost, the Roly-Poly Bird flew round and round the monkey cage and The Big Dead Tree, singing out his warning,
'There's sticky stuff now on the cage and the tree!
If you land on either, you'll never get free!
So fly away! Fly away! Stay up high!
Or you'll finish up tomorrow in a hot Bird Pie!'
Mr and Mrs Twit Go Off to Buy
Guns
The next morning when Mr Twit came out with his huge basket, not a single bird was sitting on either the monkey cage or The Big Dead Tree. They were all perched happily on the roof of Mr Twit's house. The Roly-Poly Bird was up there as well, and the monkeys were in the cage and the whole lot of them were hooting with laughter at Mr Twit.
'I'll wipe that silly laugh off your beaks!' Mr Twit screamed at the birds. 'I'll get you next time, you filthy feathery frumps! I'll wring your necks, the whole lot of you, and have you bubbling in the pot for Bird Pie before this day is out!'
'How are you going to do that?' asked Mrs Twit, who had come outside to see what all the noise was about. 'I won't have you smearing sticky glue all over the roof of our house!'
Mr Twit got very excited. 'I've got a great idea!' he cried. He didn't bother to keep his voice down because he didn't think the monkeys could understand. 'We'll both go into town right away and we'll buy a gun each!' he shouted. 'How's that?'
'Brilliant!' cried Mrs Twit, grinning and showing her long yellow teeth. 'We'll buy those big shotguns that spray out fifty bullets or more with each bang!'
'Exactly,' said Mr Twit. 'Lock up the house while I go and make sure the monkeys are safely shut away.'
Mr Twit went over to the monkey cage. 'Attention!' he barked in his fearsome monkey-trainer's voice. 'Upside down all of you and jump to it! One on top of the other! Quick! Get on with it or you'll feel Mrs Twit's stick across your backsides!'
Obediently, the poor monkeys stood on their hands and clambered one on top of the other, with Muggle-Wump at the bottom and the smallest child at the very top.
'Now stay there till we come back!' Mr Twit ordered. 'Don't you dare to move! And don't overbalance! When we return in two or three hours' time, I shall expect to find you all in exactly the same position as you are now! You understand?'
With that, Mr Twit marched away. Mrs Twit went with him. And the monkeys were left alone with the birds.