One day, Christopher Robin was cleaning out the cellars of Pooh's hole, a warren of winding holes amid the tree roots and the scurrying beetles of the dark places. Pooh had put him to work down there so as to get rid of the sound of his whining and pleading, for Robin had many debts to work off, and the world was getting no younger. The world, in point of fact, was moving on.
Twitchlet was watching Robin closely, ready to crack the whip if he looked like slackening. Otherwise, there was nothing but the stale air like a room that had been closed up for an aeon, a subtle undertaste of damp earth and raw sewerage. Twitchlet lit cigarette after cigarette, thrumming like an exposed nerve or a semicolon.
At length, Robin crawled down into the lowest passages, dragging his ball and chain behind him. Here, Pooh kept things that he had forgotten entirely, things from the young days of the old world, things that had forgotten their own names. Some of them would whisper to Robin in their dreaming, whispering amid the roots and the beetles that crawled and burrowed in the wet, clotted places.
Suddenly Robin broke through a weak spot in the wall of earth and compacted shit. Suddenly his ball and chain preceded him with great haste, and Christopher Robin fell out through the hole in the world. Into a great black void he fell, and he fell for many, many years.
He was missed only for his labour, and that only a little; for Christopher Robin had been an incorrigible laggard, albeit with a clever tongue before Pooh and his friends had cut it out and stuffed his throat full of gold.