Teddy's Button by Amy Le Feuvre

quite turned his head for the time. He jumped on Kate Brown's back—
the hired girl—when she was carrying two pails of milk to the dairy,
and the contents of both pails were spilt and wasted; he shut up a
fighting bantam cock and the stable cat into a barn, and left them
fighting furiously; he locked one of the farm-laborers in a hayloft, and
pulled away the ladder, so that he was not released for hours, and he
proved such an imp of mischief in the house that even his mother
meditated handing him over to his uncle to be whipped.
At last it came to a climax in school. He brought a lot of young
frogs in a handkerchief, put some of them in the master's desk, and
amused himself at intervals by slipping the others down the backs of
the boys seated in front of him. His corner was the most unruly one in
the room, and whilst waiting for another class to come down he began
one of his stories in a whisper to a most interested audience.
'I went to see a goblin once that I heard of. He lived in a tub on the
seashore, and he lived by gobbling up schoolmasters and governesses.
He used to cut their hair off, scrape them well like a horse-radish, and
then begin at their toes and gobble them up till he got to their heads—
their heads he boiled in a saucepan for soup. The boys and girls used to
bring their masters, when they didn't—'
'Edward Platt!'
Never had the master's voice sounded so stern. The frogs were
discovered!—and his wrath was not appeased by seeing the cluster of
heads round Teddy, and catching a few words of the delicious story
going on.
Teddy started to his feet.
'Who put these frogs here?'
'I did, sir.' The answer was boldly given.
'Come here!'
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