Hugh Lofting

“ Then Tommy Squeak stood up to speak to them and they all stopped cleaning their whiskers to listen.
“Rats,” he said, “we have a job of work to do. Follow me.” And waving his paw to Punk, Ponk and Pink, he led the way to the farm.
For a whole day and a night the rats worked very hard, trying to turn the man out. They rattled the pans in the kitchen at night. ”

“ And me an old woman. To be turned off the farm after all these years! What shall I do, where shall I go? Oh dear, oh dear!”
Then she stopped talking. Peter Punk and Polly Ponk both understood what she said because they had lived with her so long. Pink couldn’t understand because he was only a baby and he kept saying in animal language:—“Let’s go on. I don’t like this place. There’s nothing to eat here.”
“I do think it’s a shame,” Polly Ponk said to Punk, “that the old woman should be turned out. ”

“ Punk and Ponk had known one another for many years and were very good friends. The pig they treated as a baby because they said he was very young and hadn’t much sense.
The old woman did not own the farm although she had lived on it so long. The farm belonged to a man up in London who never came there at all. This man, one fine day at the end of summer when the leaves were beginning to fall in the woods, sent his nephew, a very silly young man with a red face, down from London to live in the farm-house instead of Mrs. ”

“ Then all the wasps came flying out and tried to sting him. He went running towards the house with the wasps after him and ran in through the back door of the house. The wasps kept following him—though a few stopped to sting some of the cats that were hanging about the back door. ”