Hello Grandmamma
As soon as I was out of the Ballroom¹, I took off like a flash. I streaked² down the corridor,went through the Lounge and the Reading-Room and the Library and the Drawing-Room and cameto the stairs. Up the stairs I went, jumping quite easily from one to the other, keeping well in againstthe wall all the time. "Are you with me, Bruno?" I whispered.
"Right here," he said.
My grandmother's room and my own were on the fifth floor. It was quite a climb, but wemade it without meeting a single person on the way because everyone was using the lift. On the fifthfloor, I raced along the corridor to the door of my grandmother's room. A pair of her shoes wasstanding outside the door to be cleaned. Bruno was alongside me. "What do we do now?" he said.
Suddenly, I caught sight of a chambermaid coming along the corridor towards us. I saw atonce that she was the one who had reported me to the manager for keeping white mice. Not,therefore, the sort of person I wanted to meet in my present condition. "Quick!" I said to Bruno.
"Hide in one of those shoes!" I hopped³ into one shoe and Bruno hopped into the other. I waited forthe maid to walk past us. She didn't. When she came to the shoes, she bent⁴ down and picked them up.
In doing this, she put her hand right inside the one I was hiding in. When one of her fingers touchedme, I bit it. It was a sillY thing to do but I did it instinctively⁵, without thinking. The maid let out ascream that must have been heard by ships far out in the English Channel, and she dropped the shoesand ran like the wind down the corridor.
My grandmother's door opened. "What on earth is going on out here?" she said. I dartedbetween her legs into her room and Bruno followed me.
"Close the door, Grandmamma!" I cried. "Please hurry!"???????????????????She looked around andsaw two small brown mice on the carpet.
"Please close it," I said, and this time she actually saw me talking and recognised my voice.
She froze and became absolutely motionless. Every part of her body, her fingers and hands and armsand head became suddenly as stiff as a marble statue. Her face turned even paler than marble and hereyes were stretched so wide I could see the whites all around them. Then she started to tremble. Ithought she was going to faint and fall over.

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