Because of all this, Mr Twit never went really hungry. By sticking out his tongue and curling it sideways to explore the hairy jungle around his mouth, he was always able to find a tasty morsel here and there to nibble on.
What I am trying to tell you is that Mr Twit was a foul and smelly old man.
He was also an extremely horrid old man, as you will find out in a moment.
Mrs Twit
Mrs Twit was no better than her husband.
She did not, of course, have a hairy face. It was a pity she didn’t because that at any rate would have hidden some of her fearful ugliness.
Take a look at her.
Have you ever seen a woman with an uglier face than that? I doubt it.
But the funny thing is that Mrs Twit wasn’t born ugly. She’d had quite a nice face when she was young. The ugliness had grown upon her year by year as she got older.
Why would that happen? I’ll tell you why.
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
Nothing shone out of Mrs Twit’s face.
In her right hand she carried a walking-stick. She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on the sole of her left foot and walking was painful. But the real reason she carried a stick was so that she could hit things with it, things like dogs and cats and small children.
And then there was the glass eye. Mrs Twit had a glass eye that was always looking the other way.
The Glass Eye
You can play a lot of tricks with a glass eye because you can take it out and pop it back in again any time you like. You can bet your life Mrs Twit knew all the tricks.
One morning she took out her glass eye and dropped it into Mr Twit’s mug of beer when he wasn’t looking.
Mr Twit sat there drinking the beer slowly. The froth made a white ring on the hairs around his mouth. He wiped the white froth on to his sleeve and wiped his sleeve on his trousers.
‘You’re plotting something,’ Mrs Twit said, keeping her back turned so he wouldn’t see that she had taken out her glass eye. ‘Whenever you go all quiet like that I know very well you’re plotting something.’
Mrs Twit was right. Mr Twit was plotting away like mad. He was trying to think up a really nasty trick he could play on his wife that day.
‘You’d better be careful,’ Mrs Twit said, ‘because when I see you starting to plot, I watch you like a wombat.’
‘Oh, do shut up, you old hag,’ Mr Twit said. He went on drinking his beer, and his evil mind kept working away on the latest horrid trick he was going to play on the old woman.
Suddenly, as Mr Twit tipped the last drop of beer down his throat, he caught sight of Mrs Twit’s awful glass eye staring up at him from the bottom of the mug. It made him jump.
‘I told you I was watching you,’ cackled Mrs Twit. ‘I’ve got eyes everywhere so you’d better be careful.’
The Frog
To pay her back for the glass eye in his beer, Mr Twit decided he would put a frog in Mrs Twit’s bed.
He caught a big one down by the pond and carried it back secretly in a box.
That night, when Mrs Twit was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, Mr Twit slipped the frog between her sheets. Then he got into his own bed and waited for the fun to begin.