Infinite Pooh

Piglet lay there, wondering what had happened.

Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, "Honey or condensed milk with your bread?" he was so excited that he said, "Both," and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, "But don't bother about the bread, please."

"That Accounts for a Good Deal," said Eeyore gloomily. "It Explains Everything. No Wonder."

He was getting rather tired by this time, so that is why he sang a Complaining Song.

"The atmospheric conditions have been very unfavourable lately," said Owl.

Eeyore shook his head from side to side. "Not very how," he said. "I don't seem to have felt at all how for a long time."

Isn't it funny How a bear likes honey?
Buzz!
Buzz!
Buzz!
I wonder why he does?

"Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!" said Piglet to himself.

"Somebody must have taken it," said Eeyore. "How Like Them," he added, after a long silence.

So Eeyore stood there, gazing sadly at the ground, and Winnie-the-Pooh walked all round him once.

He crawled out of the gorse-bush, brushed the prickles from his nose, and began to think again.

"You see, what I _meant_ to do," he explained, as he turned head-over-heels, and crashed on to another branch thirty feet below, "what I _meant_ to do----"

"If only I hadn't----" he said, as he bounced twenty feet on to the next branch.

_Crack!_

Then they all talked about something else, until it was time for Pooh and Piglet to go home together.

"You must have left it somewhere," said Winnie-the-Pooh.

"Let's have a look," said Eeyore, and he turned slowly round to the place where his tail had been a little while ago, and then, finding that he couldn't catch it up, he turned round the other way, until he came back to where he was at first, and then he put his head down and looked between his front legs, and at last he said, with a long, sad sigh, "I believe you're right."

But, Christopher Robin looked after him lovingly, and said to himself, "Silly old Bear!"

So Winnie-the-Pooh went round to his friend Christopher Robin, who lived behind a green door in another part of the forest.

So they all talked about it together.

"And how are you?" said Winnie-the-Pooh.

"It isn't there!"

"Why, what's happened to your tail?" he said in surprise.

"Of course, it _was_ rather----" he admitted, as he slithered very quickly through the next six branches.

By that time he had thought of another song.

"What _has_ happened to it?" said Eeyore.

Then he climbed a little further ... and a little further ... and then just a little further.

He was nearly there now, and if he just stood on that branch ...

"It all comes, I suppose," he decided, as he said good-bye to the last branch, spun round three times, and flew gracefully into a gorse-bush, "it all comes of _liking_ honey so much. Oh, help!"

"I think the bees _suspect_ something!"

It's a very funny thought that,
if Bears were Bees,
They'd build their nests at the _bottom_ of trees.
And that being so (if the Bees were Bears),
We shouldn't have to climb up all these stairs.

"Of course I'm right," said Pooh.

(_"Was that me?" said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it._
"_That was you._"
_Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker._)

"Are you sure?"

And the first person he thought of was Christopher Robin.

"Oh, help!" said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet on the branch below him.

"Well, either a tail _is_ there or it isn't there. You can't make a mistake about it. And yours _isn't_ there!"

It went like this:

"Dear, dear," said Pooh, "I'm sorry about that. Let's have a look at you."

"Nothing."

"Then what is?"