Mouse Noses on Toast Read Free

reserved for the Mouse Mayor.
    “We should order a bottle of wine,” Sandra said. “It’s not a posh meal without wine.”
    “A bottle of mouse red,” Paul told the mouse waiter.
    “Certainly, sir,” the waiter said, and disappeared through a hole in the baseboard.
    “I don’t know what to have,” Sandra said as they studied the menu.
    They were still choosing when the waiter came back with the wine, so Paul straightened his acorn hat and asked the waiter to recommend something.
    “The breadcrumbs are fresh today,” the waiter said, scratching his whiskers. “We also have a squashed sausage.”
    “That doesn’t sound very posh. What do the humanseat?”
    “This is the food the humans don’t eat,” the waiter explained. “We serve whatever they drop on the floor.”
    “I wonder what the Tinby would eat,” Sandra said. “If it had a mouth, I mean.”
    But the Tinby was not at the table.

MOUSE NOSES ON TOAST
    W HILE P AUL AND S ANDRA WERE DECIDING WHAT TO order, the Tinby had made a decision of its own. It would find out what humans ate for a posh meal and ensure its friends had the same.
    Tinbys are skillful climbers, and this Tinby was one of the best. By the time Paul and Sandra stepped out from under the charming antique dresser, it was already halfway up the leg of the nearest table.
    “There it is!” Sandra cried, pointing at the small checked shape. “We must do something.”
    But they could only stand and watch.
    At last, the Tinby flipped itself up onto the tabletop, where it leaped for safety behind the salt and peppershakers and stood very still, blinking its small black eyes.
    “I think it wants us to follow,” Paul said.
    The Tinby had had a change of plan. Rather than bring the food to its hungry friends, and have to carry a dinner plate down a table leg without spilling anything, it would lead its friends to the food.
    But how would Paul and Sandra reach the tabletop? Not even a mouse can climb a varnished table leg, and Sandra’s hands were made of tinfoil.
    As the man paid the bill, the Tinby looked at what was left of his meal. Where you or I would see a plate of half-eaten spaghetti, the Tinby saw an opportunity. Before the waiter had time to remove the plate, it tied together five spaghetti strands and dangled them over the edge of the table.
    Paul and Sandra did not like this, not one bit. What if the spaghetti snapped? What if the knots became undone? What if they got tomato sauce on their fingers?
    Paul sighed. “We’d better do what the Tinby wants, or it will sulk.”

    So the mouse and the Christmas-tree decoration climbed the clever pasta rope, Sandra going last so that she could secretly laugh at Paul’s blue bottom.
    When they reached the top, there was no Tinby.
    They were about to give up and climb back down when the Tinby appeared from nowhere, like magic.
    “It was here all along,” Sandra said. “We couldn’t see it, as it matches the tablecloth.”
    Sandra was right. The Tinby and the tablecloth were patterned with the same yellow and lime-green check. All it had to do was close its small black eyes and itwas invisible.
    A married couple was shown to the table. Paul and Sandra hid behind the camouflaged Tinby, and watched closely. The married couple was rich. The man wore a silk tie with a gold tie clip, and the diamond on the lady’s wedding ring was as big as Paul’s head.
    But the real shock came when they ordered their meal.
    “I will have the colorful parrot soup,” the lady said, “with extra beaky bits.”
    “And I,” said her husband, “will have mouse noses on toast.”
    The waiter flipped open his notebook and wrote this down. “Would that be with whiskers, sir, or without?”
    The man thought about this.
    From his hiding place behind the Tinby, Paul thought about it too. He thought about his mouse friends under the floorboards in the storeroom. Were they running around without noses?
    Surely humans didn’t eat mouse noses on toast?