"However did you come alive ?" Scraps stared at the bears.
"Mercy me!" she echoed, "You are stuffed, as I am, with cotton, and you appear to be living.

That makes me feel ashamed, for I have prided myself on being the only live cotton-stuffed person in Oz." "Perhaps you are," returned the Lavender Bear, "for I am stuffed with extra-quality curled hair, and so is the Little Pink Bear." "You have relieved my mind of a great anxiety," declared the Patchwork Girl, now speaking more cheerfully.

"The Scarecrow is stuffed with straw and you with hair, so I am still the Original and Only Cotton-Stuffed!" "I hope I am too polite to criticize cotton as compared with curled hair," said the King, "especially as you seem satisfied with it." Then the Frogman told of his interview with the party from the Emerald City and added that the Wizard of Oz had invited the bears and Cayke and himself to travel in company with them to the castle of Ugu the Shoemaker.

Cayke was much pleased, but the Bear King looked solemn.

He set the Little Pink Bear on his lap and turned the crank in its side and asked, "Is it safe for us to associate with those people from the Emerald City ?" And the Pink Bear at once replied, "Safe for you and safe for me; Perhaps no others safe will be." "That 'perhaps' need not worry us," said the King, "so let us join the others and offer them our protection." Even the Lavender Bear was astonished, however, when on climbing over the hill he found on the other side the group of queer animals and the people from the Emerald City.