Mrs Twit came back and climbed into her bed and put out the light. She lay there in the dark scratching her tummy. Her tummy was itching. Dirty old hags like her always have itchy tummies.
Then all at once she felt something cold and slimy crawling over her feet. She screamed.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Mr Twit said.
‘Help!’ screamed Mrs Twit, bouncing about. ‘There’s something in my bed!’
‘I’ll bet it’s that Giant Skillywiggler I saw on the floor just now,’ Mr Twit said.
‘That what?’ screamed Mrs Twit.
‘I tried to kill it but it got away,’ Mr Twit said. ‘It’s got teeth like screwdrivers!’
‘Help!’ screamed Mrs Twit. ‘Save me! It’s all over my feet!’
‘It’ll bite off your toes,’ said Mr Twit.
Mrs Twit fainted.
Mr Twit got out of bed and fetched a jug of cold water. He poured the water over Mrs Twit’s head to revive her. The frog crawled up from under the sheets to get near the water. It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one was having a good time.
When Mrs Twit came to, the frog had just jumped on to her face. This is not a nice thing to happen to anyone in bed at night. She screamed again.
‘By golly it is a Giant Skillywiggler!’ Mr Twit said. ‘It’ll bite off your nose.’
Mrs Twit leapt out of bed and flew downstairs and spent the night on the sofa. The frog went to sleep on her pillow.
The Wormy Spaghetti
The next day, to pay Mr Twit back for the frog trick, Mrs Twit sneaked out into the garden and dug up some worms. She chose big long ones and put them in a tin and carried the tin back to the house under her apron.
At one o’clock, she cooked spaghetti for lunch and she mixed the worms in with the spaghetti, but only on her husband’s plate. The worms didn’t show because everything was covered with tomato sauce and sprinkled with cheese.
‘Hey, my spaghetti’s moving!’ cried Mr Twit, poking around in it with his fork.
‘It’s a new kind,’ Mrs Twit said, taking a mouthful from her own plate which of course had no worms. ‘It’s called Squiggly Spaghetti. It’s delicious. Eat it up while it’s nice and hot.’
Mr Twit started eating, twisting the long tomato-covered strings around his fork and shovelling them into his mouth. Soon there was tomato sauce all over his hairy chin.
‘It’s not as good as the ordinary kind,’ he said, talking with his mouth full. ‘It’s too squishy.’
‘I find it very tasty,’ Mrs Twit said. She was watching him from the other end of the table. It gave her great pleasure to watch him eating worms.
‘I find it rather bitter,’ Mr Twit said. ‘It’s got a distinctly bitter flavour. Buy the other kind next time.’
Mrs Twit waited until Mr Twit had eaten the whole plateful. Then she said, ‘You want to know why your spaghetti was squishy?’
Mr Twit wiped the tomato sauce from his beard with a corner of the tablecloth. ‘Why?’ he said.
‘And why it had a nasty bitter taste?’
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because it was worms!’ cried Mrs Twit, clapping her hands and stamping her feet on the floor and rocking with horrible laughter.
The Funny Walking-stick
To pay Mrs Twit back for the worms in his spaghetti, Mr Twit thought up a really clever nasty trick.
One night, when the old woman was asleep, he crept out of bed and took her walking-stick downstairs to his workshed. There he stuck a tiny round piece of wood (no thicker than a penny) on to the bottom of the stick.
This made the stick longer, but the difference was so small, the next morning Mrs Twit didn’t notice it.
The following night, Mr Twit stuck on another tiny bit of wood. Every night, he crept downstairs and added an extra tiny thickness of wood to the end of the walking-stick. He did it very neatly so that the extra bits looked like a part of the old stick.
Gradually, but oh so gradually, Mrs Twit’s walking-stick was getting longer and longer.