“Oh, Eeyore!”
“And I said to myself: The others will be sorry if I’m getting myself all cold. They haven’t got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t Think, but if it goes on snowing for another six weeks or so, one of them will begin to say to himself: ‘Eeyore can’t be so very much too Hot about three o’clock in the morning.’ And then it will Get About. And they’ll be Sorry.”
“Oh, Eeyore!” said Christopher Robin, feeling very sorry already.
“I don’t mean you, Christopher Robin. You’re different. So what it all comes to is that I built myself a house down by my little wood.”
“Did you really? How exciting!”
“The really exciting part,” said Eeyore in his most melancholy voice, “is that when I left it this morning it was there, and when I came back it wasn’t. Not at all, very natural, and it was only Eeyore’s house. But still I just wondered.”
Christopher Robin didn’t stop to wonder. He was already back in his house, putting on his waterproof hat, his waterproof boots and his waterproof macintosh as fast as he could.
“We’ll go and look for it at once,” he called out to Eeyore.
“Sometimes,” said Eeyore, “when people have quite finished taking a person’s house, there are one or two bits which they don’t want and are rather glad for the person to take back, if you know what I mean. So I thought if we just went—”
“Come on,” said Christopher Robin, and off they hurried, and in a very little time they got to the corner of the field by the side of the pinewood, where Eeyore’s house wasn’t any longer.
“There!” said Eeyore. “Not a stick of it left! Of course, I’ve still got all this snow to do what I like with. One mustn’t complain.”
But Christopher Robin wasn’t listening to Eeyore, he was listening to something else.
“Can’t you hear it?” he asked.
“What is it? Somebody laughing?”
“Listen.”