"Yes," said Wag, shortly. "But I want to know--I say, Slim, what was it we wanted first?" "Wasn't there a message from your father?" said Slim. "Oh, yes, of course. 'If they're about the house,' he said, 'give them horseshoes; if there's a bat-ball, squirt at it': he thinks there's a squirt in the tool-house--Oh, there's the cat; I must----" After delivering all this in one sentence, he rushed to the edge of the table and took a kind of header into the midst of the unfortunate animal, who, however, only moaned or crowed without waking, and turned partly over on her back. Slim remained sitting on a book and gazing soberly at me. "Well," I said, "it's very kind of Wag's father to send me a message, but I must say I can't make much of it." Slim nodded. "So he said, and he said you'd see when the time came; of course I don't know, myself; I've never seen a bat-ball. Wag says he has, but you never know with Wag." "Well, I must do the best I can, I suppose; but look here, Slim, I wish you could tell me one or two things. What _are_ you? What do they call you?" "They call me Slim: and the whole of us they call the Right People," said Slim; "but it's no good asking us much, because we don't know, and besides, it isn't good for us." "How do you mean?" "Why, you see, our job is to keep the little things right, and if we do more than that, or if we try to find out much more, then we burst." "And is that the end of you?" "Oh, no!" he said cheerfully, "but that's one of the things it's no good asking." "And if you don't do your job, what then?" "Oh, then they get smaller and have no sense." (He said _they_, not _we_, I noticed.) "I see. Well now, you go to school, don't you?" He nodded. "What for? Isn't that likely to be bad for you?" (I hardly liked to say "make you burst.") "No," he said; "you see, it's to learn our job. We have to be told what used to go on, so as we can put things right, or keep them right. And the owls, you see, they remember a long way back, but they don't know any more than we do about the swell things." I was very shy about putting the next question I had in mind, but I felt I must. "Now do you know how old you are, or how long it takes you to grow up, or how--how long you go on when you _are_ grown up!" He pressed his hands to his head, and I was dreadfully afraid for the moment that it might be swelling and would burst; but it was not so bad as that. After a few seconds he looked up and said: "I think it's seven times seven moons since I went to school and seven times seven times seven moons before I grow up; and the rest is no good asking. But it's all right"; upon which he smiled.