"Of course, it was rather——" he admitted, as he slithered very
quickly through the next six branches.
"It all comes, I suppose," he decided, as he said good-bye to the last
branch, spun round three times, and flew gracefully into a gorse-bush,
"it all comes of liking honey so much. Oh, help!"
He crawled out of the gorse-bush, brushed the prickles from his nose,
and began to think again. And the first person he thought of was
Christopher Robin.


("Was that me?" said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring
to believe it.
"That was you."
Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and
his face got pinker and pinker.)
So Winnie-the-Pooh went round to his friend Christopher Robin, who lived
behind a green door in another part of the forest.


"Good morning, Christopher Robin," he said.
"Good morning, Winnie-ther-Pooh," said you.
"I wonder if you've got such a thing as a balloon about you?"
"A balloon?"
"Yes, I just said to myself coming along: 'I wonder if Christopher Robin
has such a thing as a balloon about him?' I just said it to myself,
thinking of balloons, and wondering."
"What do you want a balloon for?" you said.
Winnie-the-Pooh looked round to see that nobody was listening, put his
paw to his mouth, and said in a deep whisper: "Honey!"
"But you don't get honey with balloons!"
"I do," said Pooh.
Well, it just happened that you had been to a party the day before at
the house of your friend Piglet, and you had balloons at the party. You
had had a big green balloon; and one of Rabbit's relations had had a big
blue one, and had left it behind, being really too young to go to a
party at all; and so you had brought the green one and the blue one
home with you.
"Which one would you like?" you asked Pooh.
He put his head between his paws and thought very carefully.
"It's like this," he said. "When you go after honey with a balloon, the
great thing is not to let the bees know you're coming. Now, if you have