Egg thought that they all needed a break from their worries about the Herring Boys. He suggested they have a game of tag right in and around their house. All the Bagel Boys thought that was a great idea.
Whenever the Bagel Boys played tag they rolled and bounced and laughed. They rolled down the hallway, into the dining room, through the living room and back into the hallway. To be "home free," they had to lie perfectly flat, but that was hard to do with so many of them rolling around at the same time.
The house and the backyard had plenty of places to play tag. Inside, from the front door to the kitchen, there was the nice long hallway. The living room lead right to the dining room and then to the enclosed back porch. Upstairs, there was another hallway, a bathroom (which had a lovely round tub, just the right shape for all the various Bagels), three bedrooms (with plenty of round beds for all), and another closed-in back porch.
In the ceiling of the back porch was a skylight, and once, a really daring Water Bagel figured out how to flip his way up a ladder, open and push up through the skylight, and climb onto the flat roof of the house. No one followed him up there, so he won the hide-and-seek game. What a great hiding place, and the view was wonderful!
When they played hide-and-seek, there were many places to hide. Sometimes they bounced (carefully) down the basement steps and hid in secret places. There was lots of room and hardly any furniture to mess up. Not all the Bagels liked going down the steep staircase from the front hall to the basement. It was kind of spooky, dusty and dark, with just two small windows. (It did have a door leading to the back yard.)
There was the scary dark coal bin, the dusty place behind the big roll-top desk, or even the little bathroom. They lived in an old-fashioned house, and there was only a pull-chain hanging down to turn on the light, and none of the Bagel kids were tall enough to reach it, so it always stayed dark down there. Also, there were lots of sticky spider webs all around.
Outdoors, the boys liked to play in their backyard. That was fun, and not scary at all. The yard was rather narrow, long and fenced-in, just like all the yards on the block. But because they were really very small Bagels, they thought it was huge. There was grass and flowers growing there, and an apple tree. In the Fall each year, the Bagel Boys often enjoyed eating the apples.
At the back of the yard a gate opened to the back alley. The Bagel Boys had many adventures in that back alley, which you may hear about later.
In
the evenings, after dinner they listened to their favourite programs
on the radio, because television hadn't been invented yet. And
they used to pretend that the radio voices were really little
tiny people who lived at the back of the radio but they never
could see them!