One day Rabbit and Piglet were sitting outside Pooh’s front door listening to Rabbit, and Pooh was sitting with them. It was a drowsy summer afternoon, and the Forest was full of gentle sounds, which all seemed to be saying to Pooh, “Don’t listen to Rabbit, listen to me.” So he got into a comfortable position for not listening to Rabbit, and from time to time he opened his eyes to say “Ah!” and then closed them again to say “True,” and from time to time Rabbit said, “You see what I mean, Piglet,” very earnestly, and Piglet nodded earnestly to show that he did.

“In fact,” said Rabbit, coming to the end of it at last, “Tigger’s getting so Bouncy nowadays that it’s time we taught him a lesson. Don’t you think so, Piglet?”

Piglet said that Tigger was very Bouncy, and that if they could think of a way of unbouncing him, it would be a Very Good Idea.

“Just what I feel,” said Rabbit. “What do you say, Pooh?”

Pooh opened his eyes with a jerk and said, “Extremely.”

“Extremely what?” asked Rabbit.

“What you were saying,” said Pooh. “Undoubtably.”

Piglet gave Pooh a stiffening sort of nudge, and Pooh, who felt more and more that he was somewhere else, got up slowly and began to look for himself.

“But how shall we do it?” asked Piglet. “What sort of a lesson, Rabbit?”

“That’s the point,” said Rabbit.

The word “lesson” came back to Pooh as one he had heard before somewhere.

“There’s a thing called Twy-stymes,” he said. “Christopher Robin tried to teach it to me once, but it didn’t.”

“What didn’t?” said Rabbit.

“Didn’t what?” said Piglet.

Pooh shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just didn’t. What are we talking about?”

“Pooh,” said Piglet reproachfully, “haven’t you been listening to what Rabbit was saying?”

“I listened, but I had a small piece of fluff in my ear. Could you say it again, please, Rabbit?”

Rabbit never minded saying things again, so he asked where he should begin from; and when Pooh had said from the moment when the fluff got in his ear, and Rabbit had asked when that was, and Pooh had said he didn’t know because he hadn’t heard properly, Piglet settled it all by saying that what they were trying to do was, they were just trying to think of a way to get the bounces out of Tigger, because however much you liked him, you couldn’t deny it, he did bounce.

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“There’s too much of him,” said Rabbit, “that’s what it comes to.”

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